


The Mountain King

by M_Leigh



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Cold War, Gen, Gender Roles, M/M, Pre-Canon, office politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you know,” Haydon said to his friend Jim Prideaux one day eating lunch on the roof—a luxury to be doled out sparingly, though not rigidly—“if everyone in this building devoted all the time they wasted spying on each other to spying on the Soviets, I dare say we’d have someone in Moscow Centre by now. Khrushchev would be stepping down inside a year.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mountain King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ponderosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ponderosa/gifts).



> This fic is working more off of le Carré's novels, but familiarity with the novels is in no way a prerequisite. In fact, I tried to the best of my ability to make it readable and comprehensible to readers with no previous knowledge of _Tinker Tailor_ , although I recommend watching the film first, if only because it's perfect.
> 
> This was also informed by reading, specifically, _The Spy Who Came in from the Cold_ and _The Honourable Schoolboy_ , and borrows certain small details from them; mostly, however, this comes across in tone. I have also cribbed and bastardised some things from Ben Macintyre's excellent book on Kim Philby, _A Spy Among Friends_. However, as an "historical" document this is obviously flimsy in the extreme, by which I mean, it is not.
> 
> This has, uh, only in the most basic sense anything to do with the Yuletide prompt I received, but I hope it is satisfying nevertheless! And also: I promise there is dialogue in this fic, though it may not initially seem like it. Stick in there.

“If you lie, are you real?”

—Henrik Ibsen, _Peer Gynt_

 

+

 

Although the existence of the Secret Intelligence Service was technically not a matter of public record, it was not a great secret in London that the great brick building at Cambridge Circus was government property and that it had something to do with spies. Everyone who went in and out of there, the local shopkeepers and postmen and vagrants said, looked like that type. They weren’t the grand sort of fellows you saw in American films—they were the kind of men you saw in the civil service, who wore suits that didn’t quite fit and had a weaselly manner. Their coats flapped and their foreheads were balding, and—well, there was something a bit dodgy about them, wasn’t there? Just in their nature. The way they carried themselves. Like men on the lookout for the husband of the girl they were seeing. None of them looked the type to stand and fight, if it came to that.

The shopkeepers and postmen and vagrants, who had elaborate theories and suspicions about those grey-faced, cowardly men, thought that really the Government had it backwards: they ought to come by and ask us, they said. They were the clever ones, they said; they were the ones who really understood how the world was, not those public school twats. They had long and elaborate theories about what was really going on in Russia and what should be done to stop it: there were things they’d heard. Things everybody knew, matters of public knowledge. But those Government types, they never talked to the real people, did they? The postman liked to tell all the shopkeepers he saw, day in and day out, that he knew just how to get a whole squad of people right into the heart of Moscow, he did, if only they’d ask. Just bomb ‘em, the vagrant on the corner said, again and again, and everyone knew what he meant. Just bomb ‘em.

Of course, if George Smiley had been dispatched from his place at Control’s side to stand in front of any of them—on a post route, or in front of a shop counter, or next to a rubbish bin—and looked at them with his large unblinking eyes through his large thick spectacles, pudgy belly straining against his coat, nose quivering slightly as though he could smell all their weaknesses through their sweat, there was no doubt that each and every one of them would have stammered out his excuses and fled the scene. But Smiley would come to none of their doors.

For deep in the winding bowels of the Circus in those days, Control was still alive and in full possession of his wits and his vitality; and George Smiley, who was not precisely young but would look young in the few photos of him that would survive from the period when they were discovered many decades later, was his right-hand man; and the war was young and full, it seemed, of promise. It was not the promise of a real war, but most of the men in the Circus had not gotten much blood on their hands in the War anyway, at least not in the literal sense. It was the promise of winning. True: something like a decade had passed since the end of the real War—more, even—and true, the Americans had gone to war with Korea and lost, and once again young British boys had been sent off into a foreign land to die. But even so: the Soviet state was young, and so it could be defeated; Stalin not long dead, and so Khrushchev might soon fall; no wall had yet been erected in Berlin, and so it still seemed possible to imagine an outcome in which the great benevolent hand of the West simply swept the barricades and the barbed wire and the spectre of communism away and left behind nothing but a glorious expanse of capitalistic republics covering the European continent.

But none of this would come to pass: soon the wall would be built in Berlin, and Khrushchev would be followed by Brezhnev, and Korea by Vietnam. The war, that is, would continue. It is possible, also, that none of those paranoiacs who haunted the Circus was ever optimistic about the promise of the war at all—after all, the shopkeepers and postmen and vagrants saw them every morning looking grey and suspicious as they scurried into their great labyrinth like rats into a covered maze. Perhaps the feeling they seemed to have in the fifties—of an animal that may soon make a bloody kill—was only the product of hindsight, at a time when everything had gone even further to shit.

(That is, except for the mole, who unlike the men he greeted smilingly every morning had something to believe in, which was of course the Party. Later, inevitably, debates would rage over whether or not their greatest traitor had really believed in anything at all, but George Smiley knew that nobody really cared, in the end, about what the mole believed, and the only other people who might have been able to shed light on the subject were, after all, dead. What they were all really frightened of was the persistent and niggling fact, aggressively ignored, that none of them believed in anything themselves.)

But none of this, of course, would happen for quite some time. In the middle years of that decade men spilled in and out of the Circus, state secrets whirling around their heads, until (the saying went) they went mad, or went bad, or went dead. Or, Bill Haydon once wryly said, pushing his tea bag around in a circle, they became George Smiley, who was not the sort of fellow destined for an institution, but was certainly the maddest person he had ever met. “Of course we’re all mad,” Roy Bland had been known to say in response to this, “the girl I’m seeing thinks I’m a tax man and I’m running a man in Poland who’s such a halfwit he’s going to get blown the next time he so much as opens his mouth. Who signs up for this racket if he isn’t mad?”

The men who served as the cogs in London’s intelligence service did not, as a rule, trust each other, or indeed anyone, and consequently only made passing and comedic reference to their amorous pursuits, but they were, after all, spies, and like men everywhere, their greatest obsessions and fixations tended to be women. Bill Haydon’s theory was that people could not gossip about the state of Ukraine to more than two or three other people at their own pay grade, and so nothing became more interesting than, for instance, the state of Percy Alleline’s marriage—a subject, he said, that nobody in his right mind would find the slightest bit interesting under usual circumstances, but which in its era commanded the attention of nearly everybody on every storey of the Circus for months on end. The Circus was a hothouse—“Full of people without much going on the way of personal lives,” Haydon often added—and so Alleline’s divorce was a matter of public knowledge for some time before Control mentioned it in passing in full view of a large number of the staff, to Alleline’s intense mortification.

“Don’t worry, old chap,” Haydon said, clapping him on the back as they filed out of a meeting later that day. “We all knew she’d left weeks ago anyway.” For a week, Alleline had only left his office for strictly required meetings and to use the facilities.

“Do you know,” Haydon said to his friend Jim Prideaux one day eating lunch on the roof—a luxury to be doled out sparingly, though not rigidly—several years before the great drama of Alleline’s marriage and subsequent divorce, “if everyone in this building devoted all the time they wasted spying on each other to spying on the Soviets, I dare say we’d have someone in Moscow Centre by now. Khrushchev would be stepping down inside a year.”

“I think you give them too much credit,” said Prideaux, who had a low and deliberate voice, and sounded very wry. Haydon looked at him down his nose: he was long and rangy and had a thatch of dark hair that was already beginning to recede, and unless actively distressed he always looked the way he sounded, which was imperturbable. (When asked to describe Haydon years before, Prideaux had thought for a moment, head tilted to the side, and finally come up with, “He looks blue-blooded,” which was true.) This was a good quality in a spy: it was reassuring. Even better was the fact that Prideaux, more than anyone else in the Circus, was kind, and so when he was forced to bring agents to the brink of discovery or death, they rarely second-guessed him; and nearly always, in the end, did as he said. And if Prideaux lay awake at night thinking about it—well, the job got done even so.

Haydon, who was not kind, leaned back on his elbows and pretended to look out at the skyline, all while keeping his friend Jim in view out of the corner of his eyes. Prideaux was not fooled; he had known him, after all, since they were eighteen and Haydon was shouting nonsense about jumping off the Magdalen Bridge—foolish, Jim had pointed out to him, shuddering inside his jacket, as it was still Michaelmas, and if he jumped only his friends would be watching, and also he would likely freeze to death. Bill had decided he had liked him on the spot and so one of the great Oxford friendships of the age was born, although soon enough the memory of that night would be snuffed out: snuffed out in the minds of Bill’s other friends who had been there, who would one by one die in the War, or drink themselves stupid after; and snuffed out in Haydon’s mind when Prideaux eventually killed him. And someday when Prideaux died, finally—well, someday nobody would remember it at all.

“Perhaps,” Haydon said lightly, pulling out his cigarette case. “Even so. Can you imagine what we could achieve if we all stopped bothering about Percy’s fucking stomach problems? What does it matter that the man can’t eat a tomato?”

“Smiley knows, anyway,” Prideaux said, taking a cigarette from him and bending down to let him light it. Smiley, after all, knew everything.

“And if Smiley knows,” Haydon agreed, with the air of someone intoning something familiar, “then we needn’t worry.”

Prideaux shrugged, and Haydon glanced up at him and grinned. “Do you know who knows about Percy,” he said, and Prideaux, who had long ago grown used to these games, simply waited.

“ _Dora_ ,” he said, and threw back his head and laughed.

 

*

 

There was a secret second story in the Circus, as there is most places men work, or live, or do business: you might even call it a second society. The women of the Circus walked through the same door that the men did every morning, and came out the same door every night; they sat under the same ghostly lights and trod over the same grey floors. And yet when the shopkeepers and postmen and vagrants watched them coming in and out of the brick building they usually took no notice: “Secretaries,” they said, if they said anything. If they were feeling particularly lurid they imagined what might happen if someone captured one of those secretaries and tried to extract secret information from her, but they were really only interested in the especially beautiful girls, and there weren’t many of them passing through the Circus doors. When they did, the men watching perked up, and started spinning theories about spies, and double agents, and imagining, depending on their particular proclivities, Lauren Bacall or Rita Hayworth or Ingrid Bergman in a sleek dress and some kind of fur garment—they were men; they didn’t bother with these kinds of details—stealing state secrets and then doing unspeakable things, for reasons that didn’t really require explaining, as these narratives were only the morning or evening fantasies of middle-aged men with rather dull home lives.

In fact, the Circus _did_ have female agents dotted around the globe, though their lives were decidedly less glamorous than those men might have imagined them to be. The women who spent their days inside the Circus walls, however, had a different set of objectives: some of them were cooped up in the basement, transcribing telephone calls, stretching their necks from the weight of the large headsets they were forced to endure that would one day lead to doctor’s visits and exercises to stave off a hunch; a select few had been called to the grubby halls of the researchers—that is, burrowers—whose endless file cabinets and reels of footage and systems of information were impenetrable to everyone else in the Circus, even Control. The burrower Connie Sachs, who would one day be purged from the Circus at the request of the mole, was one of these women: Control, the story went, had found her at Oxford, yearning for something to do: so much potential, had Connie, and nothing to do with it. And so she was sent deep into the Circus, and became in her own way a veteran of the War, although the men who came after would never have thought of her in that light. She was joined by a few others: women with spectacles, women in cardigans, women with strange shoes made to make their feet point in the right direction. These were the women Control found to make their lives out of scraps of information they would never touch with their own hands. Still they all left, over the years, except for Connie. And there were always few of them compared to the men.

But most of the women in the Circus—by far the largest contingent of those women scurrying inside every morning, heads bowed, coats flapping—were there to do one thing and one thing only, and that was to take care of the men inside of it. This, at least, was the dictum set forth by she whom Bill Haydon fondly called the Madame of the Circus, a title of which nobody approved and which nevertheless could never be killed. She was of an indeterminate age, which made some of the men uncomfortable (though not, it should be noted, Haydon himself), and nobody could ever remember a single hair being astray on her expertly coiffed head. If they called her anything other than her name, they called her not the place’s Madame but instead “Mrs Control.” Control was of course, married, and even if he had been the sort of man to cheat on his wife with women in the office (which most of the other men in the Circus were, but Control himself was not), the idea of Evelyn Huntington putting up with his attentions was ludicrous in the extreme. Control was a sort of small, spindly man, who even in those days crouched in his dark office like some kind of vulture (he felt, they all always agreed, much larger than he actually was), and Evelyn—the men called her Evelyn; the girls called her Mrs Huntington, although she was not married—wore tight-fitting clothing (“But she’s classy, right,” one of the girls said about her once, a little wistfully, smoking a fag in a pub with Toby Esterhase, who still had most of his hair then and still did not know how to talk to women, “she’s a real _lady_ ”) and carefully applied her red lipstick and put blonde highlights in her hair. She had cats-eye glasses with glittering specks in the corners which she wore around her neck and put on to read things and even these did not make her look old. She was probably somewhere around forty-five but it really was impossible to tell, and nobody was guessing.

“She could kill you, Evelyn could,” Haydon said fondly once to a group of the men sitting in one of the conference rooms at the Circus, hammered under the unflattering light, ties coming looser and looser by the quarter-hour. (It was of course useless to go to pubs together all together, and besides they had just gotten a pair of agents out of Istanbul alive and were celebrating their success, though the next morning they would find out that in fact they had been taken before even getting on the plane.) “She wouldn’t even need a gun. I like that in a woman.”

“She used to get better girls,” Esterhase said, scowling into the bottom of his glass, which was actually a mug. “Nowadays—”

“You’re just saying that because the new one hasn’t give you a second look,” Roy Bland said, perceptively, and the rest of them chuckled to themselves appreciatively. (Of the old guard, only Prideaux was not there—he usually wasn’t; he didn’t go in for that sort of that thing. Nobody else would have been able to get away with this.)

“She gets sensible girls,” Haydon said, very definitively. Later Percy Alleline would rise to the top of their ranks—small, weaselly Percy Alleline with the squashed face, whom nobody in the building would trust as far as they could throw him, but who licked boots better than any of them—but in those days (those halcyon days!) Haydon was viewed as the supreme authority on everything in their little professional club. If Control was the Circus’ God and Smiley his designated son, then Haydon—well, Haydon was Peter, wasn’t he? The leader of all the apostles. Except, Prideaux would have said, Haydon would never have been able to stand crucifixion.

The other explanation for Haydon’s social supremacy was simply that he was a blue-blooded Oxford boy and that you could practically smell it on him if you got close enough. Alleline was upper-class Cambridge but without the romance, Bland was middle-class Cambridge which was even worse, Esterhase was fucking Hungarian, and Prideaux had been spat out of the continent by his strange migratory parents back to Oxford, but next to Haydon he practically ceased to exist. (“Why?” someone would ask Smiley later, and Smiley would reply, “I think that is how he thought of himself.”)

And so when Haydon said that Evelyn Huntington got sensible girls there was a shrug of consensus in the room, though nobody had spent much time thinking about whether or not their girls were sensible: they cared about them being competent, and they cared about them being pretty, and beyond these two crucial factors all other considerations fell by the wayside. Evelyn Huntington knew this perfectly well: she was, after all, a very clever woman. Very clever women were not in high demand, it so happened. Control himself had said this to her some time before: “Don’t go hiring those really clever girls, the girls who go around getting ideas,” he had said. “Just good, sensible girls who won’t go blabbing to the Russians or joining the Party. And nobody who’s already a member, heaven help us.” Control, of course, had already brought several very clever women into the Circus, chief among them the burrower Connie Sachs, thereby undermining his own policy—but it was different, of course, with the girls. Connie Sachs needed her mind. The girls needed to do what they were told.

“Very clever girls” meant girls who had managed to sneak into Oxbridge; “sensible girls” meant girls with any other university degree, as long as it wasn’t too impressive. Evelyn therefore placed euphemistic and mysterious adverts in the Times and the Telegraph looking for “Young ladies for a SECRETARIAL POSITION. University graduate. Good typing speed. Well-organised and discreet.” Letters were to be sent to an address in the City to throw the girls off the scent, and promising candidates were interviewed in an anonymous building in Hammersmith. Evelyn went through a great many girls before picking out the one or two she needed to hire at any given time. She had a very specific set of qualifications, most of which had nothing to do with intellectual capacity or secretarial ability. They always inflated their words per minute in their responses anyway, since if they had gone to university it was unlikely they’d spent much time at a secretarial college. It was understood that some catch-up time was required. But Control liked the formality of a degree: he found it reassuring, and besides, it meant the girls were used to a certain class of people. The people who inhabited the Circus belonged, after all, to a very specific class indeed.

Aside from these essential requirements were a more abstract and arguably more important set of qualifications, which remained unspoken but were nevertheless crucial: the girls had to be pleasant but not exceedingly charming. They had to be pleasant-looking but not exceptionally pretty (but also not exceptionally hideous). They could not be married. Control’s mutterings about cleverness aside, they had to be intelligent, but not overwhelmingly so: that is, not curious, at least not about certain things (all women are curious). They had to have an innate desire to please others, but only up to a certain point. They had to be unpolitical.

And so Evelyn was left with a nearly impossible task. Her hires had to be unfanatical about Britain or about communists or about nuclear bombs; these people were easily seduced to one cause or another and could not be trusted with sensitive information. They had to be clever enough to do the work and be secretive about it in their personal private lives, but not clever enough to have the desire to understand what exactly it was that they were doing. The ideal candidate, Evelyn always imagined, would be so intensely clever that she would know that understanding what exactly was happening in the Circus would not be beneficial to her own self-interest in the long-term. Evelyn had only found one of those women in all her time at the Circus and did not imagine she would find another.

Most complicated, however, was the issue of prettiness, intimately connected as it was to the most tedious and widespread problem in the Circus, which was, of course, sex. With only three exceptions, the men who worked there categorically wanted to fuck the girls who worked alongside them, and those three men were a very small proportion of the employee pool as a whole. Whether or not they were married, it was always the same: they all had spectacularly unique stories about their dissatisfying home lives to report, if pressed, that seemed to make a liaison with a girl just out of university not only natural but desirable to an outsider’s point of view.

This was, you must remember, only a decade (or so) after the War: they were still mostly young men (or so they would later think); still mostly in their prime. (Esterhase still had his hair.) And so the trouble was finding girls who, if seduced, would resist temptation. Evelyn often thought that if she could hire only girls who only liked other women she would do it—but that wouldn’t satisfy them, either. There needed to be a kind of frisson between the girls and the men they worked for. That was why the dowdy girls wouldn’t do. Even the men who would never do anything liked to be able to imagine. All of them, that is, except Smiley, who in spite of his very fine wife had a kind of sexless aura about him (the presumed explanation, everyone said, for her persistent extracurricular activities, which poor old George seemed incapable of bringing to a halt). When Bill Haydon once asked Evelyn about this, she replied, “It’s quite simple: he isn’t a lech.”

“Unlike me,” Bill said cheerfully.

“You aren’t a lech either, Bill,” Evelyn said. “You’re something worse.”

If an intelligence officer slept with a girl—usually his, sometimes somebody else’s—one of several things almost inevitably occurred: he got bored and the girl got emotional and couldn’t do her job properly; he got oppressively attached and couldn’t do his job properly; they both began acting like lunatics and decided to elope (usually when this happened the man was married); or, finally, they wound up mutually despising each other, and couldn’t work on the same floor for fear of having to see each other in the corridors. Unless the girl had to be fired she usually wound up hating and resenting the man in question, which meant shuffling personnel around, which was an enormous headache for everyone since the officers grew attached to their girls in the same way that men grow attached to favourite pets. It was, unfortunately, an unsolvable situation.

The solution, in fact, was for everyone to turn into Bill Haydon, who flagrantly and unapologetically made his way through the secretarial staff of the Circus and somehow remained beloved by everybody. Evelyn called it a “dark talent.” Haydon, dark talent or no, was undeniably a preferable option to Esterhase, who, whenever he finally managed to get into some girl’s bed, inevitably left her crying in the loo for weeks and then blistering with fury for months following.

“I did not say anything to her I did not mean,” he said, raising his hands when Evelyn finally gave him a talking-to after a particularly ugly episode. She was taller than he was. “If she interprets something I say incorrectly, this is not—”

“You are a foul little man,” Evelyn said, eyes narrowing. “Do not think I don’t see through you straight down to your core. You may expect some very deliberate placements in the future.”

“Now, now, Evelyn—” started Esterhase, who normally would not have tolerated being spoken to like that by a woman (a subordinate!) but had perhaps realised he had made a serious miscalculation. “There is no need to—”

“You call me Mrs Huntington,” she said, and snapped the door shut behind her, leaving him to sweat. The next girl on his desk was exceptionally efficient and, as they said, just a little bit queer.

 

*

 

Susanne Dyer came to Cambridge Circus at the end of winter: an unusually mild London winter that vanished as if into the ether the second the doors of the building closed behind her. Inside the Circus everything was fizzling with a peculiar energy that seemed to come from a different power source than the rest of the city. It was as though it was surviving on the heart’s blood of the continent itself.

She was a clever-but-not-exceptionally-clever girl: she had read history at King’s and gotten an upper second class degree, and then, in the absence of anything to do with the degree she had received, had begun applying for positions she knew her father would have said were “beneath” her if he had known she was applying for them. In her head she debated with him about this: whether or not he liked to admit it, they were middle-class people, and she wouldn’t have gone to university anyway if she had had even one brother; since she hadn’t, he had very stubbornly insisted that she carry on the family name. She was eminently unsuited for doing sums and figures and working out other people’s accounts and therefore could not take up the family business, and she wasn’t suited to teaching. Her options seemed to her, therefore, to be somewhat limited. Years before she had offered to do something useful—a secretarial course, or even a teaching certificate, although she didn’t like children—but her father had insisted on a proper university education. It all felt very futile. What did history have to do with anything now? she often wondered. The last forty years had blasted history away.

She had imagined that she was applying for a position at one of the firms in the City and had hoped it would pay well; when she was told that the position was in fact in the Government she was disappointed, although soon enough she realised her mistake. She had her first interview with a featureless man in a rather featureless building in Hammersmith, during which no details about the job were provided, but later that week they rang her up and brought her back and made her speak to a very imposing woman for over an hour, and _then_ , a week later, they rang her up again and asked her about meeting a third time, and finally explained in very, very vague detail what the job actually was, and asked her whether she’d like to take it. She would have to decide, they said, now. She wound up telling the girls with whom she was sharing a crummy little flat that she was working as a secretary in the City, and wrote the same thing to her parents, and got the expected response from her father—but none of that mattered, because she had a secret burrowed deep in her breast, a little clandestine thrill of significance and superiority. It said: _I am going to be doing something more important than any of you, and you won’t ever have any idea_.

The work, of course, was far from interesting. Despite the extensive training she and the other new girls all underwent, and the terrifying warnings they received about what might happen if they told anyone—even their mothers, even nice young men they might be seeing who seemed very kind and trustworthy—about anything they did in the dim corridors that would soon occupy their days and nights and even their dreams, it transpired that she did not see or hear much sensitive material. This was a circumstance for which she was in fact immensely grateful. She occasionally had visions of being captured and forced to tell all that she knew, but since she knew very little of any practical importance she knew that she would be quite useless as an informant, which was comforting. All that she knew had to do with the people in the Circus, and not what they were doing inside of it, which she at first foolishly believed to be of little consequence. On this particular subject, however, she rapidly became a dedicated student.

If the men who haunted those corridors—that is, who lived there, although their beds and wardrobes were elsewhere—learned each other’s secrets through a kind of bastardised tradecraft and the whispered conversations in convenient corners, then the women who trod in their footsteps had a different word for it: gossip, that oldest and greatest of all female pastimes. It was natural that they became fascinated with the men whose calls they took and whose letters and memos they typed and whose tea they brewed in the morning and afternoon: their minds were vaults full of state secrets. They knew the answers to questions the girls in the Circus did not even know how to ask. Even if they were sweaty and balding and wore ill-fitting suits, they seemed to wield a kind of awesome power. And so after a while it started to feel to a girl that she was less real than whatever officer she was taking care of, and his cares became her cares, his little interpersonal dramas her dramas—his life her life.

This was why so many of them fell in love with the men whose calls they answered and letters they typed up and tea the brewed. In fact Evelyn sometimes thought they were more likely to fall in love with the men who didn’t pay them much mind—the less real they were, the better. The girls, however, were not limited in their scope of interest to their own desks: the great sources of intrigue in the Circus was what the officers thought of each other, and whether they liked any of the girls, and if they were going to try to fuck them, and whether they were doing anything inappropriate professionally, which generally meant disobeying Control. Nobody knew anything about Control and nobody wanted to, but the rest of them were open season, and as clever as all of the men thought they were, none of them held a candle to the combined power of an under-stimulated secretarial staff—excepting, of course, George Smiley, who as it happened had always been popular with all of the women who worked in the Circus, for his polite manner and his disinclination toward lechery.

When Susanne arrived, she arrived with a batch of other girls, who spent several long months doing mindless secretarial tasks on the second floor before being allowed up to the third and fourth when they had been deemed acceptably prepared. A girl called Cathy was leaving that pool when Susanne arrived, and as she would later discover, was taking over for the girl who had been on Roy Bland’s desk and had quit in a fury, for reasons Mrs Huntington would not explain but which had to do with an unfortunate situation between the girl and Mr Bland, who was a nice enough man and not as prone to “that kind of thing” as some of the others. Even so, said a girl called Stacy, “It’s bound to happen once in a while, it always does.” Stacy was on Mr Prideaux’s desk and when Susanne was brought up to the fourth floor, she eventually discovered that she was the cleverest of all the girls who worked there: although she wasn’t old, she had worked at the Circus for longer than anybody of the rest of them, except Control and Smiley’s own girls on the fifth floor, and so she seemed somehow senior despite being a secretary just like the rest of them. She had a very sharp face and very dark hair, and was pretty in an odd way: exactly the sort of person Evelyn was always looking for. Wise men would have called her beautiful, but there are not many wise men.

Mr Prideaux, it was widely agreed, was not cut out for office work: Susanne soon discovered that it was common knowledge that he would soon be sent back out into the field somewhere, as he had been during the War and for several years after; there was even something about him, some of the girls reflected thoughtfully, that looked out of place in a suit jacket. He could often be seen walking around the Circus in only his shirtsleeves and tie—his ties were never very fancy, not like Mr Alleline’s or Mr Haydon’s, who were by consensus the best-dressed of the bunch—and he usually wore his sleeves rolled up unless it was particularly cold, something nobody else in the building could have gotten away with, except of course Control, who did as he liked. This was put down to eccentricity by many of the men who worked with him who had not known him during the War, and found him odd and slightly off-putting, but not exactly objectionable; the girls (several of whom, it should be noted, were in their thirties, but were considered “girls” in the Circus nevertheless), on the other hand, had given this considerable thought, and deduced from it—correctly, in fact—his distaste for an office environment. And indeed, years later, Prideaux would be sent away from the Circus to head up the scalphunters, an assignment he much preferred, although it ran against his natural kindness. This as ever was the paradox of Prideaux’s being: the things for which he was most suited in life (at least, so it seemed to him at the time, and by the consensus of everyone around him) were the kind of things that slowly chipped away at the goodness that had been inside of him ever since he was a boy, and for which there was no simple explanation, as there never is for virtue: it simply exists, and cannot be denied. The wise men among us try to protect it, while others, who find it frightening, try to stamp it out.

Stacy was devoted to him due his goodness and despite of (or perhaps also because of) his equally natural reticence. The other men were jealous that Prideaux had her, and often made comments to this effect, which he sidestepped easily (he had practice). They were, however, a good match; Stacy would not have been charmed by Bland, suckered by Esterhase, or endured Alleline, and she was too competent to have been assigned to any of the less essential functionaries who at that time served as cogs in the Circus’ great bureaucratic machine. The upper ranks of the Circus were full of young men then: for all the building was grey, it was a young place. The War was a lingering shadow, and only Smiley and Control and the career layabout Farrington, who spent most of his days sleeping in a corner office, looked down at them from what could possibly be called middle age. Of all of them, only Bill Haydon would have had a chance with Stacy, because Bill Haydon had a chance with (nearly) every girl, but because Stacy had been assigned to Jim Prideaux instead, Bill Haydon had become a different person to her than he was to the other girls, and she did not like him.

Evelyn’s plan for Susanne—who was very young, but very, she thought, “promising”—was to have her replace the girl who had been on Haydon’s desk for two years, who was getting married and was moving to Norwich. “A great bloody tragedy, you know,” Haydon told her with great pomp and circumstance on her last day, and gave her a great bouquet of flowers, a bottle of very expensive whisky (“for the lucky fellow”), and a large check, along with a kiss on the cheek that came dangerously close to her mouth. (They had, of course, consummated their professional partnership not long into her tenure at his desk; similarly predictably, she had remained devoted even as he made his way to other members of the office staff. Nobody else knew how he did it: it was his particular miracle.)

Sometimes, Evelyn moved girls up from the lower ranks to desks on the fourth floor—where Haydon and Bland and all the rest worked; Control and Smiley were at the top, one floor up—but sometimes she felt it was better to bring in new blood and let them succeed or fail on their own merit. In the case of Bill Haydon especially there was an obvious difficulty in promoting a junior girl, which was that they could all barely stay upright in front of him. Either he got someone from the fourth floor already or he got somebody new, and there was only so much chaos Evelyn was willing to inflict upon the office in so short a span of time: he would, this time, get fresh blood. The problem with Bill was that the new girls were also prone to going weak at the knees when he smiled at them.

He did, in fact, smiled very gleamingly at Susanne when she arrived for her first day as an “official girl,” and showed her around her desk himself, even after Mrs Huntington had done the same herself, and because he was so gleaming she did not stop to tell him that she already knew everything that he was saying. She was too awestruck. His tie was made of beautiful blue silk and his smooth brown hair seemed somehow—better—than the hair of all other men she had ever had any cause to know, even the wealthy young men at university who had not quite managed to get places at Oxbridge off of their family names alone. During her first week, when she was still terribly nervous about everything, despite all the training and the grunt work downstairs, he very graciously explained to her how it all worked again and then again, thereby earning her loyalty as well as her trust, and she decided (though really it had been decided for her) that if the Soviets came knocking and told her to tell them everything she knew about Bill Haydon—on pain of death!—she would very nobly refuse. She was not possessed of any exceptional patriotism, but you needed something to stand for, she thought, some kind of principle. She would not have told them anything about Mrs Huntington either, but she could not conceive of a situation in which this information would be asked of her. It never even began to cross her mind.

 

*

 

The girls used to have lunch together in the middle of the day when the men were all shuttered in their offices doing the same, or out meeting mysterious people not to be spoken of, or very occasionally hiding out on the roof. The girls working the telephones worked all through the day except their fifteen-minute breaks, and so scarfed down sandwiches in-between calls, and the burrowers—men and women alike—hardly ever emerged from their dark caverns, but the girls on the desks on the fourth floor all crammed into a little room to eat together, leaving poor Mabel, whom nobody liked, out manning the general line and dealing with crises. The only crises that arose between noon and quarter-to-one had to do with Control losing track of the time and needing something very urgently and getting very aggravated about it when it was not provided as quickly as he would have liked.

(And once, very notably, a mouse, which of course had nothing to do with the mouse at all [although Mabel had screamed and jumped up onto her chair, which then caused another set of problems as it had wheels on the legs] but with the idea that there were little hidden tunnels in the brick and concrete walls and foundations of the Circus through which anybody might be surveilling them, through which this unsuspecting mouse had crawled. It was all a rather hysterical scene given that the state of the technology at that time was unlikely to have posed a serious threat by way of a mouse hole, and especially ironic in light of the fact that Moscow Centre already had an agent working inside the Circus who did not need to burrow in through the dense walls from the dreary outdoors like a rat. But nobody but the agent in question knew this, of course.)

Stacy was ill on the rather momentous day that Susanne found out about Haydon and Prideaux: if she had not been, the revelation would never have occurred, or at any rate would not have occurred on that day. Susanne had been on Mr Haydon’s desk for several months by that time, and he had been very charming to her, though really he had not bothered her so much: he did rather a lot of his own typing and things, although she still had enough to keep herself busy. The word around the office was that Mr Haydon was soon going to be made chief of the Soviet Bureau, and so all kinds of correspondence came in and out of his office, via carefully secured envelopes and also the telephone, and Susanne filed everything and wrote everything down as conscientiously as she had been taught, and perked up whenever Mr Haydon asked her about her weekend, or her family, or her old friend Ruthie from university who was getting married already. Mr Haydon talking to you, Susanne reflected, produced a feeling not unlike standing directly in front of a brightly burning sun, but even though you knew how hot it was, you didn’t mind, because it didn’t seem dangerous. She thought there was some old Greek story about this—Dionysus and Semele—but it had ended with somebody getting burned up, as all those stories always did.

According to Dora, a Scottish girl who was quite good friends with Ursula, the woman—she really was not a girl—on Control’s desk, Mr Haydon was in fact getting the Soviet Bureau, which she told them all over lunch that memorable day. Mrs Huntington tolerated about this level of gossip since it was all going to be public knowledge in a matter of days anyway, if Ursula—silent as the grave on anything of significance, and so close to Control these days that her face had begun to resemble his in some strange ineffable process of osmosis—had gabbed about it. Ursula did not eat lunch with them. She did not ever leave Control’s desk. Sometimes Susanne wondered whether she slept there.

“Better than that bastard Farrington,” Dora said, with a little sniff of disgust, and they all made low hushed noises of approval, as though someone might be listening in (which was, of course, always possible). Chester Farrington had been kicking around various Government offices since before the War and had been rotting in his office for years, exiled to the Circus because everybody else had done their time, and he was related to an earl or a particularly influential baron or something or other. Control resented having to play along with the charade of civil service that comprised Farrington’s career and so Smiley was often dispatched to intercede on his behalf, when they needed his signature, as the nominal head of the Soviet Bureau, on this or that document: Farrington never asked questions. He often spent afternoons at his club, and liked telling people he was a spy.

This, in any case, was what Susanne had been told, because she had barely ever laid eyes on him. He was high-class in the way that Haydon was—that is, he had so much money spilling out of him that if you looked straight into it, you saw India or Egypt reflected back at you—but without any of Haydon’s youth or charm. Haydon walked on a knife’s edge, though most people didn’t realise it, because he never quite tipped over to the wrong side, but Farrington was what he would have become if he hadn’t succeeded at keeping himself upright: everything that made Bill Haydon the glorious flame burning bright at the heart of the Circus, that allowed him to tower over his compatriots there and wherever else he went, had manifested in Chester Farrington as a kind of ugly and insidious class superiority that was not really superior at all. Farrington’s voice was so nasal Americans couldn’t understand him—Haydon and Prideaux had discovered this, during the War, to their immense pleasure—and he wore ostentatious cufflinks and drank port and had not done a single day’s work since 1950. Everybody was awfully relieved to see the back of him, though of course they were really only getting an upgraded version: a version that passed better in society, that seemed more like a normal person, who could smile at the bourgeoisie and speak their language with only a modestly amusing accent when he so chose. But Haydon’s father was also a child of the Empire—and so, after all, was Haydon himself. So his replacing Farrington—whose job he had unofficially been doing for years along with Bland—was really nothing more than the passing of the torch.

Susanne Dyer did not know any of this, of course; Susanne Dyer, in all her years at the Circus, learned only a fraction of everything that there was to know about the story that was slowly to unfold there and eventually, many years later, bring the place to its knees and the very plaster out of the walls. Susanne was one of the _petite bourgeoisie_ that Bill Haydon was so good at charming, and though she was naïve she was also clever, and in the absence of anything interesting to do had become watchful.

“What did they do to get him out finally?” a blonde girl called Liz asked, and Dora shrugged.

“No idea,” she said. “But he’s on his way.”

“I heard they’re farming Prideaux out soon,” another girl called Edith said. She had thick spectacles and a voice like she knew what she was on about. “Somewhere out east.”

“How east?” Liz replied.

“Oh, just in Czecho, not East-east,” Edith clarified, but Liz was clicking her tongue against her teeth.

“Bill’s going to go bloody mental,” said Dora, who had, of course, gotten to know him intimately several years before.

“What’s in—Czecho?” Susanne asked, stumblingly.

“It’s unstable,” Edith said. “They think they can get him in without causing a fuss. Everybody’s awfully angry about everything over there. Students, you know.” Everyone, it seemed, did know. Susanne said nothing.

“Have they told Mr Haydon yet?” asked Liz, who had, remarkably, been wise enough to stay out of Bill Haydon’s way.

“About Prideaux?” Edith said. “Don’t you think you’d be able to tell?”

“Control will tell him once he’s already left, I expect,” Dora said, sounding sage.

“I—but why would he be upset?” Susanne asked finally, unwilling to be left in the dark. Naïveté can be a blessing in certain cases, and this was one of them.

They all turned to gaze at her.

“Unless I shouldn’t have asked,” she said.

Edith tapped her nails against her mug. “Why do you think,” she said, in the tones of someone explaining something to a small child, “Stacy has been on Prideaux’s desk for so long? You do know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Susanne. “They seem to get along.”

“Yes, quite,” Edith said. “I also imagine Mr Prideaux hasn’t bothered you since you got here.”

“No,” Susanne said. He hadn’t spoken to her much at all, though he stopped by quite often for Mr Haydon; Mr Haydon always seemed to know when he was outside the door. He was not a very talkative fellow, Mr Prideaux, but he had a couple of times asked very kindly after her mother and her father, and where she was from, and that sort of thing. She thought he was a very nice man.

“Unlike the rest of them,” Edith continued, giving her a pointed look.

“Well,” Susanne said. “Yes.”

“It’s because he doesn’t like girls,” Dora interjected, and raised an eyebrow. “You know what I mean.”

“Oh,” Susanne said. “But—”

“Bill likes both,” she said.

“Oh,” Susanne said again, bewildered.

“The high-ups don’t know,” she added. “Even Control doesn’t know, Ursula’s told me. And don’t you say anything to anybody about it, all right? Even if they come asking. There’s rules about this. About the kind of thing we say to each other and to them. And things they don’t need to know about.”

Susanne thought privately that possibly everything was “things they need to know about,” but did not say so.

“If they want to figure that out,” Dora said, “they can do it all on their own time.”

“They do know about Bill, actually, I think,” Liz said. “At least, I’ve heard some things. I think they just look the other way. But I don’t think any of them knows about Prideaux.”

“Oh, to be a boy in an English public school,” Dora said. “The things you must know and not know.”

“Even spies,” Susanne let slip out, somewhat incredulously. “Even Smiley?”

“Even Smiley,” Dora agreed. “Even spies.”

“Especially spies,” she added a moment later, and took a sip of her tea.

 

*

 

Haydon was promoted to Soviet Bureau Chief, and Prideaux was sent out to Czecho to set up a network, for “an as-yet-to-be-determined period of time.” News of this got out a few weeks before Control had decided he ought to leave, and so the Circus was treated to an entire week of Bill Haydon walking up and down the corridors in a state of absolute and profoundly childish fury, a week of abject sulkiness, and a week where all the polish seemed to have worn off of him, and the fact that he was not getting any younger became suddenly and startlingly apparent. Susanne privately thought that it was really Stacy who ought to be the most broken up about the whole thing, since nobody knew what was going to happen to her once Prideaux finally left, but in the meantime she busied herself with making Mr Haydon lots of tea and refusing all calls. The stack of messages he was going to have to sort through when he got himself back together was growing alarmingly thick.

Prideaux himself seemed to have decided to ignore Haydon’s histrionics in favour of preparing himself to go abroad; he spent several days re-acquainting himself with the minutia of tradecraft at the nursery at Sarratt, although it was generally agreed amongst everybody that Jim Prideaux of all people did not need to brush up on anything: you could drop him, they said, in the middle of Moscow—in the middle of _Siberia_ —and he would probably manage to make it back to England in one piece. He spent long afternoons cooped up with Control and said nothing to anyone about what they had discussed while inside. When Roy Bland asked him how he was feeling he said he was looking forward to it: “Desk work never really suited me,” he told him, and that, everyone agreed, was true.

On his last day, Haydon shut himself up in his office and didn’t come out. Susanne knocked on the door from time to time, but he ignored her, so she just took messages and pretended to be busy and gossiped with Edith, who had the closest desk to hers, until Mrs Huntington stared them down and they had to go back to pretending to work. Prideaux walked by several times, eyeing the closed door and lingering, but didn’t stop. Finally, as the end of the day arrived and everyone else began to leave—though there was always _somebody_ in the Circus—Susanne went to knock on Mr Prideaux’s door. Stacy was already gone: she had been inside the room with him for some time earlier in the day and then left to go home at three, and nobody had stopped her.

“Yes?” he said from inside the room, and she cracked the door open.

“Oh, hello, Mr Prideaux,” she said. He was sitting behind his desk not doing anything with his shirtsleeves rolled up, like usual, and looked vaguely surprised to see her. She didn’t think she’d known any homosexuals before, except (as her mother often loudly remarked to her father), her Uncle Jerry (on her father’s side), whom she had only met once when she was small and who now lived in Lisbon, which she wasn’t sure counted. Mr Prideaux, she thought, did not seem like a likely candidate to be a homosexual. Or, for that matter, a likely candidate to be a spy. He just seemed so very regular.

“I just wanted to wish you good luck, sir,” she said, still half-hanging out of the doorway. “With your trip, and all that. You were always very nice.” He looked surprised. “Also, if you wouldn’t mind please going and seeing Mr Haydon, because I can’t get him to come out of his office myself.”

He blinked. “I see,” he said.

“I’m going home now,” she told him. “Well, I’m going to get my coat and things, and then go home. But I think you should force him out, he can’t have eaten since ten.”

“Well,” Mr Prideaux said, “we can’t have that,” and stood up.

“No, sir,” she said, and scurried off before he could say anything else, leaving him standing behind his empty desk with his hands on his hips, thinking.

He walked down the line of empty desks to Bill’s door, which had light coming from the bottom, and tapped it in as close an imitation of the girl’s knock as he could muster.

“Oh would you fuck _off_ , Susanne, I’ve told you not to bother me any more,” Bill snapped, and Jim pushed the door open. He was reclining on his compact little sofa—installed, Jim was fairly certain, for the purposes of extracurricular activities involving female members of staff—with his tie wound around one hand, which was resting on his forehead, and a glass of whisky on the floor next to the other.

“Hell,” he said when Jim shut the door behind him, lifting his hand away from his eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“I work just down the hall,” Jim said. “Perhaps you’ve seen me round the place.”

Bill just looked at him and then put his hand back down.

“Your girl came by to tell me to come get you out of here,” Jim said, looking around. “She thinks you’re going to starve.”

“Does she,” Bill said.

“Apparently so,” he replied. “She seems quite clever.”

“Do you think?” Bill said. “She reminds me of a rabbit. Very eager. Very jumpy. Not too bright.”

“Someday you’re going to get out-smarted by one of those not so bright girls, Bill,” Jim said, kicking at the couch until Bill sighed and swung his legs around.

“If anybody outsmarts me it’ll be you, darling,” he said as he stood up, and Jim smiled a little at him, but there was something else under his expression: the skull beneath the skin.

“If I knew how to outsmart you, Bill, I’d have done it a long time ago,” he told him, and Haydon knew immediately that he wasn’t lying.

“I know,” he said briskly, picking up his coat and bag. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They walked out of the building one after the other and back around to the parking structure; it was one of Control’s eternal bugbears that you couldn’t simply take an elevator straight down to the car park. “You picked the spot,” Smiley usually said when he went on these tears, not looking up from whatever he was reading, voice very mild, wetting a finger to flip a page. Nobody ever saw Control leave, though they knew—somehow—that he did not stay the night, so this seemed like an odd complaint (did he even have a car? Smiley, they knew, did not), but there it was.

“Later,” Haydon said almost dismissively when they reached his car, and Prideaux watched him for a moment before continuing down the empty row of spaces and getting into his own battered little Renault. Haydon’s car peeled out onto the street with an audible screech, lights glowing dimly behind him, and Prideaux found himself shaking his head as he turned his key in the ignition.

He did not leave his own home until half-nine that evening: when he arrived he parked out front, made himself a drink, and adjusted everything in his small suitcase for at least the fiftieth time. He did not have many possessions. The rest of them were in boxes to be put into storage god knew where. Most of it was incidentals: cookware, bedding, a lamp that had belonged to his aunt but to which he himself had no particular attachment. Otherwise the furniture was staying; Smiley would do with it what he would. They couldn’t use the flat itself as a safe house—his name was on the lease and in the records—but he could imagine his sofa and the worn blue rug that lay in front of it in some other anonymous room halfway across the city. By the time he got back—well, who knew who would have made use of it. He didn’t know when he was coming back. It was bad to think that way, in the field. It kept you in yourself when you needed to become somebody else. And it was an especially dangerous way of thinking if you were going to be away for a long time, which he was. He didn’t know how long: that meant long. He might not come back at all. That was what Control had told him by not telling. But as they said: if anybody could make it out of even the worst war zone and back to England without a scratch on him, it would be Jim Prideaux. Jim Prideaux himself was not exactly of this opinion himself; at least, not now that his vigorous youth had passed. He was, he knew, like everyone: just another death as yet unrealised.

There was one box full of everything Prideaux had allowed himself to keep, over the years, to remind himself, when he got back from these little jaunts, of who he was or had been in some distant past: forms from Oxford, letters from his father, newspaper clippings from the War and the medal that he had won and never looked at, pictures of their entire ragged band—first at Oxford and then later in the service; a different bunch, but in name only. Most of them were dead. Photos of him and Bill over the same period: one taken by old Bertie Fowler over the side of a punt, which he had given up pushing, while Bill lay back with his legs lolling over the side, looking criminally pleased with himself; another at formal hall in white tie, standing very straight next to each other like two matching penguins—Bill’s bowtie was done perfectly and his was drooping, of course—and trying to look serious (Bill could never look serious); another taken somewhere in Italy, when everything had been dirty and foul and the light had given Bill an awful sunburn. Jim spoke decent Italian and went around acting as translator while Bill pulled his skin off and pretended to be incompetent, and at night they convened with good old Fowler—may he rest—and snuck information back north. This was before they were split up and sent deep into enemy territory. Those horrible years in Italy were now the happiest years in memory, between all the violence. They looked tired and very young and beautiful under the muck and grime of war, in the photos. The War would always be their young and beautiful time, and perhaps that, Jim reflected, was why they were still in the service. All the beautiful things they had known in their youth were just the bright shining side of horror and death. And so no matter how hard they tried to get back, they would never be able to manage it: they would just wind up deeper and deeper in the bowels of the Circus, chasing a fever dream. And when they finally caught it they would find that it was death.

He locked everything up in that box very securely, as though Control or Smiley couldn’t have gotten inside in a matter of minutes if they’d wanted, and left it next to the other boxes of his odds and ends, which he imagined he would never see again, before putting his coat back on, ambling out onto the street, and hailing a cab. He took it all the way across town to Kensington and had the cabbie drop him a good mile east of Bill’s place, near some noisy pubs and less reputable establishments, and then walked the rest of the way, winding through and around side-streets and glancing at street corners and shadows as he went. But by the time he reached Bill’s door he was quite alone, and suspected he had been all the time he had been walking.

Bill opened the door wide, light bright and yellow behind him, and pretended as though he were surprised to see him.

“Why hello, old chap, fancy seeing you here,” sounding very unconvincing for a spy. “Do come in, there you go.” The door snicked shut behind him. “Good god, man, it took you long enough.”

“Well,” Jim said, sliding his coat off, “you can’t be too careful.”

Bill grabbed it and tossed it over the back of a chair as he walked back toward the kitchen. “If anybody could be, it would be you, Jim,” he said, and Jim, who had followed him, leaned against the doorframe and watched him poke at the teakettle.

“That should be a comfort to you,” he said mildly. Bill did not look comforted.

“You’re being stupid,” he said baldly, as the kettle began to sing. “It’s not as though we didn’t earn our desk jobs—”

“That’s not really the point,” Jim replied, watching him pour the water into the pot over the leaves. Bill, being a modern sort of aristocrat, drank happily out of a tea bag at work but had standards he stuck to at home. Jim could never tell the difference.

“They’ve got people out there already,” Bill continued, still watching the water course into the pot. “Everybody in Berlin—”

“Don’t be dense, Bill,” Jim said. “You know as well as I do that Berlin’s not Prague.”

“No,” Bill muttered. “At least part of Berlin is habitable.”

“Chin up,” Jim said. “I spent a whole summer in Prague one year, and there were hardly any ex-pats so I just spoke to all the local children. You pick up loads that way.”

“Maybe _you_ do,” Bill said. “The _rest_ of us—”

“Look,” Jim interjected. “Somebody has to go, don’t they? And I’m the best man for the job.” He paused. Bill was watching the tea very determinedly. “Isn’t that right? Who else are they going to send? Grossman?”

Bill shuddered. “I think not,” he said.

“So, there you are,” Jim said, as though he had won the argument definitively, which he had not. “For Queen and country—isn’t that right? If Control asks me to do something—”

“You do it,” Bill finished. “As do we all.”

He looked well and truly miserable: he was wearing an oriental dressing gown and the state of his hair suggested it had been the victim of his distress. Jim felt a great painful feeling inside himself that he could not control or entirely understand: he had known deep in his bones from that first night on the Magdalen Bridge that Bill was better than he was; that there was something in Bill that he could never understand or match. Bill could see things that he, Jim, could not; could speak about things using a language that Jim, for all his foreign tongues, would never be able to grasp. But there was no solution to the problem of Bill, and Jim had finally defaulted in the game of trying to come up with an answer. The only escape, he figured, was his old, familiar friend: expatriation.

He was feeling so much he wanted to vomit. “Come on, now, Bill,” he said, instead. “You know I’m no good at a desk. I’m not suited to it. I’ll like it better out there. Gets the adrenaline pumping. That’s what I ought to be doing.”

Bill didn’t say anything and didn’t look up. At Oxford all the girls from Somerville and Hilda’s had been overpoweringly in love with him, and he with them: with all of them, with the possibility of them, with what they represented and with the actual physical fact of their white freckled bodies that were endlessly at his disposal. In Michaelmas of their last year, with the War on the horizon and murmurings of working out a place in the intelligence service for Jim on Bill’s recommendation—he knew somebody, there was something he could do about it, it was all very hush-hush and very thrilling, except that Jim was dogged and was still preparing for his finals as though they mattered—he had crawled in through Jim’s first-floor window on a Friday night in nothing but his shirtsleeves, having lost his jacket somewhere, teeth chattering.

“What the hell,” Jim said when he saw him, shutting the windows behind him.

“I’m dead sozzled,” Bill replied, leaning against the wall in what was a rather crooked fashion. The remnants of white tie were on him but mostly he looked like a half-completed person, somebody who needed a few final touches before he could really become himself. He rubbed at his face. “I’m running away from a girl.”

“Really,” Jim said.

“No,” Bill said. “Well, sort of. I was just _talking_ to a girl and one of the dons got his head all turned around about it—”

“You’re a nightmare,” Jim said wearily. “Do you need a coat? A glass of water and an aspirin?”

“I’m not leaving this room until daybreak,” Bill said, quite melodramatically. “They’ll have sentries posted at my door.”

“Oh fuck off,” Jim said, collapsing back in his chair, although secretly he was quite pleased that his was the room Bill had chosen as his place of refuge. “I do have work to do, you know—”

“It’s Friday,” Bill said, damningly. “And it’s _late_. You haven’t.”

So it transpired that Bill managed, somehow, to get out of the remnants of his white tie, and despite Jim’s protestations crawled into his quite narrow bed with him, and although Jim had been hopelessly besotted with him for nearly as long as they’d known each other, he was still immensely surprised when Bill capitalised on his rather compromised position, and didn’t look mortified about it in the morning, but instead criminally pleased with himself. For a very brief period of time, Jim’s mind ran through endless possible outcomes to this situation, some catastrophic and some so idyllic as to be impossible, but the last thing he was expecting was to find Bill acting much the same as he always had with Clarabelle Edwards the following weekend.

Now, so many years later, standing in Bill’s very elegant but rather grubby kitchen—he needed a wife, Jim thought idly—he found himself thinking that Bill had not changed at all. It was a rare moment of gleaming insight that would fade by morning, but it made his stomach clench. There was a silvery, slippery core at the centre of Bill that neither the War nor adulthood had seemed to touch: as though he was the boy who could never quite manage to grow up. To survive in the Circus you needed some kind of unbreakable quality, although that was not really the right word, for they all knew that everyone was breakable. Some unyielding quality, perhaps: Alleline had his sliminess, Bland his dogged thoroughness, Esterhase his simple refusal to die, and Bill—Bill was, Jim sometimes thought, like Janus. He made light jokes and flirted and acted as though nothing mattered to him at all, but nobody was as sober as Bill was when something was going wrong, nobody as quick to come up with solutions, and nobody was as hungry as Bill, except of course for Smiley and Control. But now in his moment of clarity—which by daybreak would be nothing more than a dream—a part of Jim suspected that in fact, despite all of this, deep in his quicksilver core, Bill did not care about anything at all.

Jim had survived the Circus for precisely the wrong reason: he was loyal. Nobody in the Circus was supposed to be loyal to anybody except Control. But despite what the girls at their typewriters and telephones believed about their unique insight into Jim Prideaux’s secret life, even Control knew where Jim Prideaux’s loyalties lay and had lain for eighteen years: more than half of his life, now. The mistake, Control knew, was trying to eliminate human error instead of managing it. His own mistake, later, would be imagining that he had it managed.

Now Jim Prideaux, who was loyal to his country and the Circus and Control and Bill Haydon—in that ascending order of importance—stood watching tea steep. “Come on, Bill,” he said again, swallowing. “You know I can’t stay here.”

“I don’t know that at all,” Bill said, sounding like nothing more than a spoiled child, which he was.

“Bill,” Jim said, voice rough. Bill’s knuckles were white against the counter. “I can’t—”

“You always take things so personally, Jim,” Bill said, voice sounding very clipped.

Jim didn’t say anything, just shrugged one shoulder. They were very broad but lean—his was a ropy musculature. There had been days at Oxford where Bill Haydon had just sat back watching him on the rugby pitch, pretending to be social or reading philosophy and in fact paying very little attention to anything but the rapidly expanding line of sweat on Jim Prideaux’s shirt. Even after Bill had started crawling through his window on a routine basis—he seemed to prefer the vague sense of transgression this act produced, though Jim could have let him in through the porter’s lodge like anybody else—Jim still never worked out what was going on. Some of the other boys, who had after all spent their adolescences at Eton and Harrow and so were not ignorant of certain proclivities of the flesh, had found the entire affair wildly entertaining, though they had never said anything to Prideaux about it, or indeed to Haydon. Haydon was too revered; Prideaux too beloved. It was a secret sacred thing that simply also happened to be universally common knowledge.

“It’s no good, Bill,” he said finally. “All this.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re bloody talking about,” Bill said angrily, and stormed into the next room, tea forgotten. Jim drifted after him. “Years and years and years and all of the sudden you decide you want to go to bloody—Czecho, where you’ll get blown the second you arrive—the supreme _arrogance_ —”

Jim raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, stop looking at me like that,” Bill snapped. “And don’t tell me you’re only going because Control’s decided you simply _must_ go, you’ve been on a desk for years.”

“I’ve already told you,” Jim said. “I’m sick of it here, Bill. I feel about to go mad.”

“So go to Berlin,” Bill said. “Go to Istanbul, for god’s sake. Go—”

“We’ve got people there already,” Jim said. “You know we have. They’re not going to rip everything up to accommodate me.”

“How long is this going to go on, anyway?” Bill asked. “This— _deep cover_ mission of yours?”

“Well seeing as I’ve got nobody back at home waiting for me—”

“God _damn_ it, Jim!” Bill shouted, and Jim wondered, not for the first time, about Bill’s neighbours. “You can’t just go _saying_ that—”

Jim ran one hand over the side of his head. His hair was beginning to recede. He hadn’t noticed until Bill had pointed it out to him, and it hadn’t bothered him; his father had been bald. Bill had been awfully distressed, though: it was easy to tell when Bill was distressed. “You know, I’m going to die someday whether or not my hair stays in,” Jim had pointed out, which had not helped.

“Bill,” he said. Bill was pacing back and forth in front of him now, hands on his hips, shoulders jerking back and forth. “Bill.”

“You are being—un _fair_ ,” he said finally, voice going up at the end, like a child. “You are—you are—”

“Stop it,” Jim said, feeling very tired all of the sudden. “Bill—would you please—stop it.”

Bill stopped walking but Jim could see the movement built up in him, a sort of nervous vibration. He turned to look straight at him and his eyes had a strange light in them.

“You’re leaving me,” he said, and Jim covered his face with his hands.

“You are,” Bill said. “You’re running away.”

Nobody knew, Prideaux thought, how difficult it was to do: to pack up and go. To say no to Bill. He didn’t want to do it. He wanted to put his head against Bill’s chest and listen to the blood there—they had both seen too much blood—and never move again. But he couldn’t. There were reasons why he couldn’t and they both knew them but neither of them wanted to say them aloud.

He turned and walked down the hall to Bill’s bedroom without looking at him, and shoved his shoes off rather violently. Bill was following him, feet thudding less gracefully than usual, and by the time he entered the room Jim had sat down on the edge of the bed and had his head in his hands. He stood in the doorway and watched him.

“I’m tired,” Jim said finally, from behind his hands.

“So take a holiday,” Bill said, and Jim let out a choked, awful little laugh.

“Maybe I’ll just vanish,” he said. “Go to Africa or something. Never come back.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Bill snapped. “Don’t be stupid. What would you do in Africa.”

Jim wiped one hand over his face—he wasn’t crying—and looked up at him. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I can’t do anything else.”

“You’re weak,” Bill said bluntly. He had crossed his arms very tightly in front of him; his robe had gone crooked. “If you can’t stay it’s because you’re weak, and—and—”

“Bill,” Jim said, and he stopped, and after a long moment Bill came to sit down next to him.

“If things were different,” he began, but couldn’t finish.

“No,” Jim said, and swallowed. “There are—there are different rules for you, Bill. All right? I understand. But I—I can’t—”

Bill squeezed his eyes shut and turned to press his face against his friend Jim’s shoulder. Jim curled his fist in his robe, and after a long time, Bill relaxed, slumped against his side.

“Do you remember the second time we—you know?” he asked, and Jim glanced down at him.

“Of course,” he said.

Bill swallowed. “I was so sure,” he said, “that you weren’t going to let me in the room. That I’d ruined it.”

“I didn’t have any sense,” Jim said.

“I walked up and down on the street for an hour before I worked up the nerve,” Bill said, almost distantly. “I almost threw up. Finally some don walked by with his wife and asked me if I was all right.”

He sat up, looking a bit fuzzy, and then pulled them up the bed until they were lying next to each other gazing up at the ceiling. It was a familiar view. Jim felt like a woozy dead weight next to him: it was over, he thought. It was all over now. He turned to press his nose into Bill’s arm, to smell him. He smelled like the French cigarettes he insisted on smoking, and tea, and cologne.

He half-sat up, awkward, while Jim stayed lying there, to pull the robe off and toss it over the side of the bed onto the floor. When he came back their faces were pushed so close together that they could only see strange distorted parts of each other’s faces, dark in the shadows. They had looked younger once.

“I hate you,” Haydon said, and Prideaux replied, “I know,” and Haydon kissed him, digging his fingers into the hair at the back of his head so hard it hurt.

 

*

 

When Susanne got to work the following Monday, Mrs Huntington was waiting with her things in a box at her desk. For a moment she thought she was being sent home—back to Warwickshire, she found herself thinking slightly hysterically, all the way back to her mother and father’s kitchen table—but then Mrs Huntington began to march her over to Mr Prideaux’s old office.

“You’ll be helping out Mr Stanley,” she said, setting the box down on Stacy’s desk. “You know he’s going to be very anxious about Mr Smiley and Control, so you be as helpful as you can imagine—without getting stupid,” she added, looking stern.

“Of course not,” Susanne said, still confused.

Fred Stanley was not the sort of man any girl was likely to get stupid over. He had been moved up to replace Jim Prideaux and seemed to know just as well as everybody else that he was not of his calibre. In fact Stanley was much better suited to desk work than Prideaux ever had been, but he was a nervous man, and had spent the War working in the Home Office in London, which the men who had spent those years roving about the continent or the desert saw a sign of moral inconstancy. They did not know that Stanley had been an air-raid warden during the Blitz, and on one of his few nights off early on had once been woken up by a strange large sound, somehow inside of his own head, and found that the building next-door to his own had been hit: nothing left, just rubble. Everybody was dead, even the baby. “Even the baby,” he told everyone at work the next day. As though it should have some kind of special protection against violence, when in fact the opposite was true.

They did not know this so it did not signify, and instead he was a balding, slightly sweaty intelligence officer who made poor small talk and so usually did not try, just quietly did his job to the best of his ability, which happened to be high. But this hardly mattered: he was replacing Prideaux, who had never been precisely _popular_ with his compatriots, but who was familiar to them, and had long since earned their respect. Anyway, he had also been Haydon’s favourite, which signified, and even if the men had never quite known what to make of Prideaux, the women had, and they were not at all happy to see him replaced.

Susanne was not pleased to be put at his desk, but could not keep up cold formal politesse for more than a week: he was awfully solicitous—maybe even a little _too_ solicitous—and was immensely anxious about everything, from following correct protocol to chatting with the other officers on the floor to making her job as easy as possible. She found herself in the strange position of trying to get him to allow her to take over some of his tasks, since he really was not in a state to be doing everything himself. He was almost embarrassingly grateful for even the smallest things, and in spite of herself Susanne found herself becoming rather fond of him. He wasn’t a bad sort, she thought. He probably should have stayed in the Home Office. It would have suited him better.

But as well as she and Fred Stanley began to get along, she still found herself gazing almost mournfully across the office at her old desk, and the door behind it: Bill Haydon had not gone back to being his old cheerful self after Jim Prideaux’s departure, and she had been rather abruptly estranged from him, and it all seemed dreadfully unfair. Now when she saw him, it was usually while he was bouncing erratically from one state of being to the next: morose and reclusive one moment; cheery the next; and then needlessly furious when something did not go exactly to his liking. Stacy had been stationed at his desk ever since that Monday when Susanne had been wrenched away with no warning, looking like some kind of ward or sentry, and spent long stretches of time cooped up in his office with him with the door closed.

Nobody was foolish enough to imagine anything untoward was underway: Stacy had come in that week newly engaged and was, they all agreed, vastly too sensible to get involved with Bill Haydon either way. That was in any event not kind of comfort Haydon needed (as far as they were concerned), though that had not stopped him from rather crudely seducing one of the junior girls in the secretarial pool—one of the particularly stupid ones, whom Evelyn had put on the desk of a junior officer, and whom he made so hysterical that she had to sack her. It was a great office scandal: nobody could recall Bill Haydon getting a girl in such a state. Susanne had never seen Mrs Huntington in such a state herself, and Liz, who had been there much longer, concurred. She forced Mr Haydon into her office and berated him so loudly that they could all hear, and indeed all stopped working to catch as many of the details as possible. After that episode he sulked for a week, but his moods calmed down, even if he was still miserable to be around most of the time.

Susanne had only been on his desk for seven months when Prideaux left, and knew that it was foolish to feel proprietary or entitled: after all, wasn’t that an awfully short time compared to Stacy? And now he was gone entirely. She knew, too, that girls got cycled round all the time; seven months wasn’t even really so bad. But she still wished that she were the one taking care of Mr Haydon’s wretched states. She could not help it. She had grown attuned to the specific rhythms and rituals of his life over the course of those months: it was as though he were a particular moon and she had some tidal pull inside of her that had adjusted minutely to accommodate his constantly shifting phases. Although she liked him more than she had initially expected to, Mr Stanley simply wasn’t as exciting.

She wanted to ask Stacy: how is he? What is he saying? Is there anything I can do to help? But she knew this would be grossly unprofessional. With anybody else she might have tried it, but Stacy was of another class entirely, not by birth but by sheer mettle. The idea of gossiping with her was unthinkable. Susanne spent even more time now than she had before—and she had often, before, watched Stacy from across the office, trying to figure out how she worked, and to sit more like her, back very straight, wrists off the desk—trying to emulate her. She privately thought Stacy would be an awfully good spy, and this was almost true, but her one defect was that she, like Prideaux, was too kind, but her kindness, unlike his, was clinical, was diagnostic. Like Prideaux, she was loyal, but she was not susceptible to charm, and for this reason had never had any patience for Haydon. So she was loyal to Prideaux, who had no charm, only goodness—more loyal to him than to her own family, to her country, or even to her fiancé, whom she loved. If Prideaux had told her the man she was going to marry was a Soviet agent, she would have believed him.

“You must look after him,” Jim had told her before leaving, of Haydon. “He won’t know what to do.”

“All right,” she had said.

“I know,” he had replied, looking sympathetic. “It will be very trying work. But it will be all right. He’ll treat you as though you’re me.” He must have seen something on her face, because he’d let out a little laugh. “It’s not as bad as you think. You’ll see.”

He’d given her a hug before he’d left, for the first time. Their black heads together looked like raven’s wings.

“What did he tell you?” Haydon had asked when she arrived at his desk the Monday after, desperately, like a man who was starving. He’d closed the door behind her and she’d twisted her ring.

“He told me to look after you,” she’d said, and the energy had gone out of him, and he’d sunk back onto his desk.

“Oh,” he’d said, and then nothing else.

She had watched him for a long time—his beautiful tie and suit jacket and the bags under his eyes and his hair that was missing some of its gloss—and then reached out one hand to rest it on his shoulder.

“I will,” she’d said, and something flicked across his face that she didn’t quite catch.

Susanne meanwhile remained occupied with Mr Stanley, who after his initial bout of nerves had settled into a state of low-level anxiety that did not seem to impede but rather to propel his work. He apologised compulsively after requesting anything, and thanked her at least twice when she had done whatever it was he had asked for; it seemed, ultimately, that her presence did more to complicate than to simplify his life, but they soldiered on nevertheless. She said this to Mrs Huntington one evening, when the office was dim, and quiet, sounding morose and almost despairing. Mrs Huntington looked at her through her cats-eye glasses for a long moment, unblinking.

“Mr Stanley may be under the impression that he could do very well without your, or anyone’s, assistance,” she told her. “But I can assure you that he could not. He may be able to type his own memos, and reports, and he may even be able to take all of his own calls. But after a week of having to do these things, and get his own tea, and all of the other little things that you do that he does not realise that you do to make his life just that little bit easier, he would come to see that his job was much, much more difficult than he now understands it to be—perhaps just difficult enough that it became impossible.

“Besides which,” she added after a pause, “you do not serve a mere practical function in this office. You are also here to be a feminine presence. Every man needs encouragement from a woman, even if he may not know it. If we were not here, what would happen to all these men? Imagine how uncivilised they would become. And you know we all think they are quite uncivilised to begin with. They are doing very dangerous and important work; we must make sure that they are as supported and as balanced-out as possible. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I think so,” Susanne replied, although she didn’t, really.

“Of course,” Mrs Huntington said very clearly, “we must all maintain professional standards. I fear that this is sometimes more difficult for them that it is for us. But we must simply accept this as part of their character as men.”

“Yes,” Susanne said.

“You must always remember that you are just as important as each of them is,” Mrs Huntington finished. “In your own way.”

“Thank you, Mrs Huntington,” Susanne said, and riding the tube home later that evening watched the men standing reading the Evening News or gazing in front of themselves with a kind of glazed expression, as though they were elsewhere, thinking about other things: so many men packed into such a small space. The middle-aged woman next to her, she noticed, was asleep.

That night, as she fried potatoes on the hob and boiled water for tea in a saucepan because the kettle had gotten a hole in the side and none of the three of them had broken down and bought a replacement, she tried to work out what Mrs Huntington had said to her as best she could. The radio was playing tinny music and the windows were fogged up from cold: it was February. Prideaux had left in November. Before Christmas.

Was it true, she wondered, that all men wanted encouragement from a woman? That all of them needed something from her—some undefined thing inside of her that she could only hold out to them for the taking, until it was gone? That was built for that purpose, maybe, and slowly refilled itself until one day it stayed empty and hollow, and she had nothing more to give.

She thought hard, shivering as she watched the steam rise off of the boiling water. When she had taken the job they had explained to her that she was doing a service—a service for the country, quite literally, but also for all the men that worked there, who needed it. She would, they had said, be providing something useful. But she had always felt that it was really the other way around: that Mr Haydon was giving her something when he asked about her parents, or about her weekend; that _she_ was waiting to be given something from _him_.

But now she tried to think. It was not hard to conclude that Mr Esterhase needed girls to talk to him; Susanne had been at the Circus for just about a year and had watched him chase after no fewer than six for varying periods of time. Susanne thought that Mr Esterhase was a sort of pathetic man, but he was also an exile, which gave him sheen of tragedy that she did not quite want to puncture. Mr Bland was much nicer than Mr Esterhase but he was not really so very different: he just wasn’t as fickle. Alleline was unfathomable, but Mr Haydon—Mr Haydon, she thought slowly, as though it were all so much molasses pouring through her mind—who was so charming to everybody in the office, and had of course done all sorts of improper things with lots of the girls, one after the other, although never with her—probably that was what Mrs Huntington had been talking about, when she talked about a _feminine presence_. But there was something fuzzy and un-worked-out in Susanne’s mind about Mr Prideaux and Mr Haydon that knotted this up, left it a muddle. Somebody like Mr Prideaux—what about that, she wondered? Did it make a difference? She wished she could ask Mrs Huntington but it seemed like this would be breaking some unspoken but inviolable code the girls had amongst themselves about gossip, and the men whose letters they read and wrote and whose liquor cabinets they stocked.

Still: if Mr Prideaux did not like women in—that way—then did it really matter at all what they thought of him? She puzzled over this. Stacy was the cleverest of all them, but Mr Prideaux had not seemed to need her in the way that Alleline needed Dora, who managed all of his affairs with a kind of superlative steeliness to which the rest of them all aspired. And yet at least according to the others, Stacy was the only one who had not had to be moved to a different desk in all these years, and Prideaux, Susanne thought, had loved her. And she had loved Prideaux. Dora certainly did not love Mr Alleline. So nothing worked out neatly, and this annoyed her. She liked puzzles that could be solved, and it felt as though Mrs Huntington had given her half of an equation and not the second part, or not fully explained the solution.

She ate her potatoes and beans looking out the dark window, huddled in a sweater. The one clear thought that she managed was that it would be nice to think that she was as important as Mr Haydon, or Mr Alleline, as Mrs Huntington had said. But she knew that she was not. If she got married and left—if Stacy left, now that she was getting married; as she would one day soon, they all imagined, when she became pregnant—would Mrs Huntington said that whatever she did at home was as important as what she was doing at the Circus? She could hear her mother’s voice in her ear: _What, you don’t think being a mum is important, do you? Is that it? Where would you be with no mum, what do you say to that?_

But like Eve, Susanne had tasted the fruit of knowledge and could not go back. And it was only when she arrived at the dreary grey Circus in the morning that the world gained its full colour. Though perhaps Eve was not exactly the right story: once, years before, Bill Haydon had tried to explain to Jim Prideaux that working in the service was like walking out of Plato’s cave.

“You see everything so much more clearly,” he had said, “it’s—there’s so much out there, Jim, that you don’t know about. That you can’t _understand_. Because it’s kept a secret.”

“And you want to tell me,” Jim had replied, sounding slightly amused. “You sound like you’re trying to come on to a girl.”

“I’m serious,” Bill had said, so sincerely that Jim had become serious himself. Jim had always followed wherever Bill went, after all, once Bill had taken the plunge. “There’s a war on, Jim.”

“I know,” Jim had said, although they were still living in that strange liminal time when the war did not yet mean bombs at home.

“Sometimes I walk around in my life,” Bill had said—Bill, who was only barely twenty-one, and despite what he thought knew nothing about the world—“and everything just looks—grey. Because there are so many things I know that all of those people on the street don’t. And I don’t know the half of it, Jim.”

“Why me?” Jim had asked, and Bill had stared at him blankly.

“Are you asking me that seriously?” he asked finally, and Jim just stared back.

“Jim,” Bill had said, very fondly. “I think maybe you’d be an awful spy. Or maybe an excellent spy, on anybody but me.”

“Why would I ever be spying on you?” Jim had asked, and Bill had reached up to tug on his hair, which in those golden days in the unbothered green corners of Magdalen College was still thick and dark, and grinned, and then flopped back down on his back, staring up at the blue sky through the leaves until the sun started to glare too brightly and he closed them, and Jim watched him instead, for a long time, until the sun had gone down nearly all the way, and they were left in the gathering dark.

 

*

 

As the months passed and the strange ghostly void of Jim Prideaux faded into a simpler kind of absence, Bill Haydon began to regain some of his old charm and authority, to the enormous relief of the women who had previously enjoyed his attention, and even of Roy Bland, who despite his relatively senior position at the Circus was not by nature an particularly ambitious man, and had always liked him, and had found the drawn-out spectacle of the past few months immensely uncomfortable. The same could not be said for Toby Esterhase and Percy Alleline, who having suffered the indignity of being passed over for a promotion when Haydon was assigned the Soviet Bureau had enjoyed his period of sullen hibernation, and found themselves chafing when he suddenly re-emerged as something approximating his old self, expecting all the old social privileges and somehow getting them, in spite of their firm resolutions that it should be otherwise. Bland was useless and Fred Stanley was even worse: Stanley was a middle-class London boy who had never gotten a degree and had instead just toiled away in civil service for long enough that it had stuck—an inevitable product of the war years—and so found Haydon impossibly impressive. Haydon rapidly befriended him, in the way that high-class men sometimes deign to befriend their objectively inferior peers: with a great, swelling sense of magnanimity and charm that extended just far enough to gratify himself without actually costing himself anything. Stanley did not seem to mind. “How the hell did he survive eight years at the Home Office without soiling himself at the sight of anyone in a decent suit?” Alleline said to Esterhase one afternoon, snidely, and Esterhase laughed in his nervous, unpleasant way.

In fact, they had expected and hoped for Stanley to fade quickly, but despite his almost childish reverence for Haydon, he was better at his work than any of them had anticipated, or really than anybody who observed him on a day-to-day basis would suspect based on his demeanour around the office; as such, there was nothing anybody could do to get him sacked, and so he continued to reinforce Haydon’s de-facto status as their ruler and superior, and Control continued passing choice assignments his way, and so everyone else simply festered.

As far as Susanne could tell, there was not much behind all of this except a bad case of loneliness, for despite Mr Haydon’s slowly improving countenance, he was still not entirely his old self, and it was in his presence that the ghost of Mr Prideaux could most acutely be felt. Mr Stanley was not, of course, an adequate substitute for Mr Prideaux—or really any substitute at all—but he was a willing and listening body. Susanne suspected it did not matter to Mr Haydon as much as Mrs Huntington thought whether that listening body was a woman or a man, and not just because of all the—other things.

But the more Mr Stanley began to assume Mr Prideaux’s former place at Mr Haydon’s right hand—in some ways if not in others—the more Mr Haydon appeared at Susanne’s desk, sometimes to pass something along to Mr Stanley and sometimes to order him around and sometimes simply to talk at him, and soon enough Susanne found herself once again one of those listening bodies Mr Haydon somehow seemed to accumulate so effortlessly: he leaned against her desk and chatted at her very amiably, hands folded across his lap as his leg dangled over the edge, one perfectly shined shoe knocking against the distinctly less gleaming wood. Usually she could barely remember what he’d been talking about by the end of the day: it hardly seemed to matter as much as the way he said it. He certainly spoke to her more now than he had when she had been on his desk. Now that Stacy was on his desk, and the initial months of turmoil had passed, he mostly he shouted incomprehensible things out at her from inside of his office, which she seemed to understand, and by which she was not fazed. It was difficult to faze Stacy. As hard as Susanne tried to reproduce this quality, she could never seem to manage it. Things still excited her.

Around this time, on one particularly notable evening, Evelyn Huntington saw fit to corner Bill Haydon after the rest of the office had trickled out through the front doors into the street. Earlier that afternoon he had spent six whole minutes—she had been keeping track—perched on the corner of Susanne Dyer’s desk, shining down on her, before Fred Stanley emerged from his office, wiping the sweat off of his brow, for a two-minute conference on god only knew what, and then Haydon had wandered off again, hands in his pockets, whistling.

“How’s tricks?” Haydon asked when she had closed the door behind her and folded her arms threateningly under her hanging cats-eye glasses. She looked like the sort of woman Katharine Hepburn would play in a film, if Hollywood were making a film about the office machinations of British intelligence.

He had a cup of tea in his hands and was swirling it around. He looked up at her, waiting. They had known each other for a long time. Evelyn Worthington had been the first person hired for the SIS—as it was still commonly known then—after Control, all those many years ago, when she was barely out of her girlhood, and he not much older. They had spent nights awake until nearly dawn trying to plan out the dark belly of the War, days traipsing through Whitehall flogging away at Ministers and MPs until the SIS was something approaching a real organisation, a real being, living and breathing under the law: an unspoken truth. Evelyn stood by the door and held Control’s papers while he made their case. And then the boys started to roll in: sons of old intelligence officers under the old system, and their friends, and friends of friends, all with money in their teeth. And one of them had been Bill Haydon. She remembered him as a boy: how earnest he was, how eager, how duplicitous. She had never trusted him, especially not after he had dragged tall dark Jim Prideaux behind him, so narrow in those days, but all muscle and liquid eyes. The Inseparables. That’s what they had called them. She had never trusted any of them: any of them except Control.

“What’s he called, really?” Haydon had once asked her, trying to be charming.

“Nobody knows,” she’d told him, although that had been a lie: she knew. But nobody else did. And it had stayed that way.

“I’m as marvellous as ever,” she said to Haydon now. “I have been meaning to ask—how is your seduction of Miss Dyer progressing?”

He blinked and then continued stirring his tea.

“I am sure I have no idea what you mean,” he said.

“Don’t be dense, Bill,” Evelyn snapped. “You aren’t _dense_. I’m not _dense_. I can see two feet in front of me.”

“Not closer,” Haydon murmured.

“Bill,” she said in an ominous tone of voice. “I swear—”

He raised a hand. “Apologies. I’m doing no such thing, however. It’s terrible slander.”

“We’ve known each other a long time, Bill,” Evelyn said. “I know you. I can tell. So I’m saving you from yourself. Out of the goodness of my soul.”

“Is that so.” He glanced up at her, eyebrows raised, from his cup of tea.

“You are not to do your usual tricks with that girl,” she said. “I know you think you can get by anybody. That you can do whatever you like with anybody and they’ll still love you.”

“In my defence,” he said mildly, “the evidence has generally suggested—”

“She would be so _disappointed_ in you,” Evelyn interrupted. Her eyes were sharp. Bill had gone still and wasn’t looking directly at her. “She has an idea of you, Bill. Even if you’ve tarnished a little, she has an idea of you. And if you ruin it—you won’t be able to get it back. She’s a very sweet girl. Don’t do that to her.”

He looked like he wanted to say something—like he wanted to argue. He didn’t speak for so long that she had almost left by the time he did.

“What’s her idea?” he asked finally. She looked surprised.

“That you feel things,” she said, and left.

 

*

 

One night at a pub far enough away from the Circus to be considered safe territory, Susanne and Liz ruminated on the issue of Bill Haydon. Despite only being a couple of years older than Susanne, Liz had already been working at the Circus for four years; her father was in the civil service and she had dropped out of uni halfway through after being lured into intelligence. “Well I thought it was going to be a bit more glamorous,” she explained, chewing on a chip, “even though she did explain it all to me. I thought, you know, I’d be really impressive and they’d give me some sort of important job or send me to Berlin or something. Instead I’m picking up Roy Bland’s dirty handkerchiefs. Do you know he stuffs them all in his desk drawer? And if I didn’t do something about it they’d probably reproduce. At least he’s seeing some girl from outside now and isn’t bothering me; it’d be nice to stay on the same desk for a while.”

Liz had, she had once explained to Susanne, become awfully infatuated with the first man she’d been assigned to, years before—a real arsehole, she’d said matter-of-factly. He was gone now. Off in Istanbul or some miserable hot place. Good riddance, and so on. But she was done with all that now.

“They’re all like children,” she said. “Do you know what Stacy calls us? The mothers. That’s right, isn’t it? We’re not girls. We’re like their mothers. Men always want to sleep with their mothers. I read that in an article.”

“Freud,” Susanne said, and took a sip of her half-pint.

“Someday they’ll all get married,” Liz said darkly, “and then their wives will have babies, and nothing will change.”

“Why aren’t they married, do you think?” Susanne asked. “They’re old enough.”

“They think they’re still young,” Liz said. “They aren’t. And they don’t have to. Not like us.”

“Are you seeing anyone?” Susanne asked.

“Course not,” Liz scoffed. “Where would I meet a fellow? Someplace like this?” She gestured around at the scummy pub, where a group of men around their age were exhorting loudly about the football. “Everybody I knew at uni thinks I’m a secretary at a bank. Course I’ve not seem most of them in ages except at Christmas parties. Then I have to pretend I know anything about banking.”

“Do they ask you questions?” Susanne said, surprised.

“No, but the men they’ve brought along do,” Liz said sourly. “Can’t believe I’m a career woman. Fortunately they’re none too bright most of the time.

“But our men,” she continued, “they’ll find themselves women at their clubs, and make babies, and then come back to work and find girls to screw around with there, and the world will go on and on like that forever. Just wait. You’ll see.”

“That’s awfully grim,” Susanne said.

“I’ve had too much to drink already,” Liz said, “I need another to bring me back round.”

She left to get another drink and left Susanne to watch the pub churn along in her absence: the men shouting about Arsenal; others clustered in a corner, leaning against the wall with a particular confidence in their bodies that only men had; some women packed around tables, watching them; some fending them off; some only pretending to.

“What’s a pretty girl like you doing here all alone?” someone asked over her shoulder.

“I’m not,” she said, turning to look up at him. His hair was falling over his eyes and his shirt was unbuttoned just slightly too far. She remembered the first month of university when they had all learned what young drunk men looked like if they hadn’t already known: maybe they had seen them before, in the streets at home, or even in their own homes, but it had not been the same. “My friend’s at the bar.”

“Really,” he said, and then Liz came back, and said, “Fuck off,” and sat down, and he did.

“I think Bill Haydon’s going to be the first one,” she said, taking a sip off the top of her glass, and then wiping off her upper lip. “To get married. Because it won’t matter who the girl is, so he won’t have to spend much time looking.”

“Really?” Susanne said.

“Oh, sure,” Liz said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Why shouldn’t he? Everybody loves Bill. It’s awfully peculiar he isn’t married already, don’t you think?”

“Well—no,” Susanne said, perplexed. “Because—you know.”

“Oh, that,” Liz said. “No, that won’t stop him. He’s still sore about it, don’t you see? Nobody knows when Prideaux will come back or if he ever will at all and so Bill will find some girl to marry out of spite. And then regret it if he does, of course.”

“I suppose it would only be natural,” Susanne said, and Liz shrugged.

“Have you ever known one of them before?” she said. “My father had one in his office for years. Everybody knew but they all liked him terribly so they pretended they didn’t. Nobody _liked_ it but they pretended. I used to see him at parties. Arthur. He always had a bowtie on. My mother didn’t like me to speak to him—of course she thought he was some kind of deviant—but I didn’t understand that at the time and I liked him, he was very clever and told wonderful stories. All the children liked him. I always thought it was quite sad.”

“What happened?” Susanne asked.

“Oh, someone found something out, and he got sacked,” Liz said vaguely. “I don’t remember. They didn’t arrest him, so really he was lucky.”

“They haven’t sacked Mr Haydon,” Susanne said.

“Well, he sleeps with women, doesn’t he,” Liz said contemplatively. “I suppose that’s reassuring. And he doesn’t really seem like somebody who _could_ be sacked. Besides, everybody at the Circus knows all sorts of terrible things about everybody else. They can’t sack anybody. Except us. Well, they _can_ ,” she added after a moment. “But they don’t _like_ to.”

They lapsed into silence for a moment. “It’s all quite sad, isn’t it,” Susanne said finally.

“Horrible,” Liz agreed.

“You know,” Susanne continued after a moment, “I would have thought—I would have thought it would be worse for Mr Prideaux. You know. All the—”

“Leaving, and all that,” Liz interrupted. “Yes, of course.”

“But,” Susanne said, the thought a glistening sphere in her mind, that she knew she might puncture at any moment, “I think—well, I don’t know what Mr Prideaux is doing, or I suppose how he’s doing. But it seems as though actually—Mr Haydon has it worse.”

Liz didn’t say anything for a long time, but she was looking straight ahead of her with an expression of great concentration. Finally, she said: “It’s because Prideaux knew he needed him and decided to go anyway. But Bill didn’t know. And then he found out.” And Susanne immediately knew that she was right.

 

*

 

It was funny how time passed without them noticing it: in the Circus time didn’t seem to pass at all, marked only by the constant rotation of personnel and the periodic ripping of telephones out of the wall to make way for newer models. Of course in the world time was passing, and in the files of thin coloured paper passed from desk to desk: the threat in the East was changing and metastasising in ways that perpetually eluded perfect and complete knowledge. Time ticked forward and the shadow of the war in which they had all invested their lives spread slowly over and into the earth. Time passed and men and women were married and babies were born and people died, and still Jim Prideaux did not come back from Czecho, and soon there were girls who did not remember him at all: girls to whom he was a legend; Old Circus, something that had to do with the War—the real War, which they had never touched and did not know.

It was funny how they all got older: it was funny how fast the marriages came. First Percy Alleline—who, they all wondered, from the highest echelon of the Circus to the lowest, could ever possibly be persuaded to marry Alleline?—and then Roy Bland and then—wonder of wonders! Miracle of miracles!—Bill Haydon. He’d done the expected thing and found some woman at his club—“Very grand,” Stacy told Susanne quietly, when nobody else was around, in a rare moment of commiseration. “Goes without saying, I suppose. But, you know.” She affected a voice. “ _Very grand_.”

“How do you know?” Susanne asked. “Have you seen her?”

“Offered to drop something off for him,” she replied frankly. “One-time-only affair. I told him I wanted to see her, no bones about it. He didn’t seem too bothered.” This seemed, Susanne thought, characteristic of their odd arrangement, but did not comment.

Maybe, they thought, Haydon would bring her to a Christmas party—that was if she knew what it was that he did, which given that she was “very grand” and had been found (as if for purchase) at his club suggested that she did. The Circus was a hermetically sealed chamber until you reached a certain social strata and then it seemed that everybody knew somebody who was in intelligence, or knew of somebody’s cousin or uncle or nephew or brother-in-law—you know, that fellow, lovely chap, if you like I can put in a word, why yes they _are_ trying to break into Moscow, isn’t it dreadfully exciting. Nobody outside of the Circus had any idea what actually happened inside of it but its existence was not as much of a secret as Control (whose wife had never been seen by anybody except possibly Smiley—nobody could swear to this either way) or Smiley would have liked. People like Control and Smiley could not stop people like Haydon or even Alleline from doing whatever they liked. And there were many others crawling around those dimly lit corridors who had come up through Eton and Harrow and Oxbridge, whose fathers had titles or just about, who did not bother hiding themselves among their own species, for the ruling class do not fear themselves.

Haydon of course made a large to-do about his wedding around the office, telling everyone long fanciful stories about his bride-to-be that were almost certainly untrue, and speculating on their potential future together. Nobody could remember the last time he had uttered Prideaux’s name; some of them had forgotten the entire affair. Susanne and Liz and Edith had not—and neither, they knew, had Stacy, although they could not have known for how long the air between Stacy and Haydon had remained nothing more than a thick overpowering smoke full of Prideaux, a heaviness that neither of them could avoid breathing—or how long it had been since they had become estranged from his memory. Stacy was no longer Prideaux’s-girl-who-was-now-Haydon’s but simply Haydon’s girl herself, and her long distaste for him became something else, for Stacy was always loyal.

“You like her, sir?” she asked the evening after he’d broken the news, although she had had her suspicions for weeks. The door was closed behind her.

“Hmm?” he asked. “Oh, yes, very well. You know George has always seemed happier with Ann, when she isn’t—you know.”

“I don’t see how that applies,” she said. It was a strange comparison to make, since George Smiley’s marriage was infamous in the Circus for its extended and perpetual failure: nobody believed the Smileys would ever separate, but they also did not believe that Ann would ever stop with her endless string of gentleman callers. It was just a strange quirk of George’s personality, they supposed, that he allowed it.

“Oh, you know,” he said, waving a hand vaguely. “I’m not getting any younger. I’m sure you won’t have noticed, what with my dazzling charm. One has to settle down some time.”

“I suppose one does,” she said.

“When are you going to start having dreadfully serious little sprogs anyway?” he asked, glancing over the papers on his desk, which were so scattered as to be unreadable.

“I don’t know, sir,” she said. “I quite like working.”

“Yes,” he said with sudden emphasis. “As do I. Working, and having you work for me. I don’t recommend babies any time soon, or ever. They’re really an awful nuisance, you know, and at least if I get stuck with one I can ignore it.”

“It would grow up to hate you,” she pointed out.

“All children grow up to hate their parents anyway,” he said. “It’s a losing battle. Unless they die when they’re very young. Then they think they’re gods.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Let me know if you want to send a message.”

He went stiff and then relaxed again so quickly it would have been difficult for almost anyone else to catch it. “I never want to send messages, Stacy,” he said. But when the latest dispatch came in from Prideaux the end of it read: _TELL HAYDON I HAD A DRINK FOR HIM_. “I didn’t say anything,” Stacy told him when he brandished it at her. “People talk about you, you know.” Which did not seem to make him feel any better.

“I never really thought he’d do it,” Edith said the day he made his announcement, watching him chat up younger girls on the other side of the office—the new blood, they liked to say, just up from the third floor. “Not _really_.”

“I did,” Liz said with a grim air of satisfaction. “I thought he’d go sooner.”

“Really?” Edith asked.

“Really,” Liz said.

“Not just because of all that other business,” Edith said, chewing on a peanut. “I mean, he just doesn’t seem like the type.”

“They’re all the type,” Liz said. “They want someone to take care of them round the clock and they want to own somebody. They start getting older and they panic.”

“Well, I hope she knows what she’s bought into,” Edith said.

“She’s bought into the Haydon family line,” Liz said, doing a snobbish little gesture. “Good enough for some, I suppose.”

“It’s all just quite bleak, isn’t it,” Susanne said.

“Better her than any of us,” Liz said, and Edith shuddered. “Don’t misunderstand me, he’s a beautiful man. But I wouldn’t marry him if you paid me.”

“Which, technically—” Edith began, and then Mrs Huntington appeared out of nowhere, and they scattered.

Later that afternoon Mr Haydon stopped by with something for Mr Stanley, whistling quietly to himself and looking cheery.

“Oh, he’s on the telephone,” Susanne said when she looked up and saw him. She opened her mouth to say something and then shut it again, fingers curling around her pen, which she tapped against her leg.

“It’s no trouble,” Mr Haydon said with an easy smile. “How are you these days, Susanne?”

“Oh, fine,” she said. “Nothing much exciting happening.” She paused. “I wanted to say congratulations, sir. I’m sure she’s a very nice woman.”

“That’s hardly the first word that comes to mind,” Mr Haydon said, “but thank you nevertheless.” He laughed a little at her expression. “Oh, I’m just having a bit of fun. Of course I’m madly in love.”

“Of course,” she said, as Mr Stanley hung up the phone. She pressed the button for the intercom and picked up the phone.

“Mr Haydon here for you, sir,” she said, and he walked in, and shut the door behind him with a snap.

 

*

 

Mr and Mrs Bill Haydon had been happily married nearly a year when the operation in Czecho collapsed and the continent spat Jim Prideaux back out into London, sopping wet, underfed, and sporting several days’ worth of beard, although this is slightly ahead of the sequence of events. Later, the women who remembered Jim would try to piece together everything they had gleaned from snippets of written reports and conversations and everything else they had once sworn to let pass from their minds as soon as it was out of their sight, but the picture they formed was imperfect and incomplete. The real story was this:

In Czecho Jim Prideaux had a source. Let us call him Václav. Let us take for granted that Václav an important member of the KSČ; let us assume that Václav had access to government at the highest levels. Let us assume, in fact, that Václav was a member of the Presidium, and a protégé of Zápotcký while he was alive. It is then safe to extrapolate that it was Novotný’s rise that led Václav, disillusioned with what he saw as the totalitarian progression of the state, to begin passing state secrets to a man we will call Anton, whom Václav knew was not Czech despite his perfect speech and knowledge of geography. He thought the man looked Russian but he knew that he was also not a Soviet, for the Soviets were different kinds of thieves. He knew that he was not a Slav of any kind. He was, therefore, from the West.

We can imagine the meetings between Václav and Anton, which took place in a tiny flat in a building out in Vršovice, or in the Olšany Cemeteries, or when Václav went to visit his mother out toward Plzeň. Are these meetings not easy to imagine? Imagine that Anton was the only person who knew Václav’s secret: that he was a traitor. That he had been seduced. The only one! His confessor. Imagine everything Václav must have told him. There is nothing so very complicated about the meeting between the East and the West. The East says: everything I believed is a lie now, and the West offers its own lie instead.

Václav had a wife. Let us call her Ludmila. Let us assume that Ludmila knew all the songs of the party by heart and had sung them in front of gatherings of people. Let us assume that she had a picture of Lenin hanging in a prominent spot in the house. Let us assume that her father had been killed by the Germans during the War. Let us assume that she loved her husband very much, and let us assume that, against all odds of personal history, she became pregnant. And that at this time the Presidium and the President were passing the new Constitution, and men started to follow the man we know as Václav through the streets.

By the time the first telegram reached London reading, once decoded, _SOURCE SHELLEY REQUESTS EXTRADITION. URGENT. HIGH LIKELIHOOD SOURCE BLOWN. READY AT SIGNAL. PLEASE CONFIRM WITH PROGRAM_ , to the consternation of Control and his man George Smiley, it can safely be assumed that Anton and Václav had already gone around and around and around the issue and come up with nothing but what Václav had first suggested. He was certain that he had been found out and that there was little time before the KSČ arrested him: once this occurred, he knew, there would be no getting out, no arguing back, no mercy. Novotný would be happy to get rid of him. He was old guard. Novotný had doubts about him, doubts which would soon be proven correct, since he was sitting in a flat in Vršovice with a spy from the West trying to arrange defection. And once they got him they would get Anton, he reminded him. Anton did not tell him that he would not be found. But he did not want to be blown.

The telegraphs passed furiously between London and Prague until finally it was agreed that Václav and Ludmila could be granted visas and new Western lives. Control and Smiley and Bill Haydon, as chief of the Soviet Bureau, sat in cramped rooms until small hours of the morning arguing about the visas and the logistics of the extradition, which would have to go through Berlin. Haydon rarely had much to do with the operation in Czecho, by his own design, instead focusing on the Soviet state itself, but a defection from under the noses of the KSČ was a serious matter. Nobody trusted defectors.

Meanwhile we also know that Václav, who had done the impossible and procured visas for himself, his wife, and the unborn child that nobody in London knew existed, was forced to explain to her what would soon occur. It would be natural for him to try first to use as little detail as possible, but his wife was an intelligent woman who would in other circumstances have been high in the party leadership and was not fooled. So of course it would all wind up coming out: his treachery, his friend Anton, the doom that awaited him if they stayed in Prague. She was doomed, too: nobody would believe that she was innocent of her husband’s crimes. So he had left her no alternative but England, and a child raised in the West, outside of communism.

We can imagine the fight that must have raged all night in their small apartment in the New Town, but Ludmila was a woman who had married a man: this was her first grave mistake. Because she had married a man she could not escape him or what he had done and so had to follow him into the foolish territory he had chosen. And her second grave mistake was that she had fallen in love with him, and therefore was even further at his mercy.

On the night that the defection was to take place, nobody was left in the Circus except for Smiley, Control, Haydon, and a boy called Isaacson who was manning the telegraph machine. They had a bottle of whisky with which they were spiking their tea, although Control had given up with the tea altogether and was simply drinking whisky out of a teacup. Smiley was sitting very still, not moving at all. Anton was taking Václav and Ludmila to the border, all the way past Děčín, and a German was meeting them to take them to Berlin, where someone else would sneak them into the West. “How come he’s got to take them?” Haydon had asked, over and over. “How come they can’t get to bloody Dessin themselves?”

“Because,” Smiley had said slowly, “they are not going to be in a state to be doing anything on their own that night.”

Eventually, the telegraph machine buzzed to life, and they all leaned forward, as the boy Isaacson began to furiously write the message down. He frowned at it before reading it aloud.

“‘No package received in Pirna,’” he intoned. “Where’s Pirna?”

“Fuck,” Haydon said, and slapped his hand against his leg.

“Pirna is in Germany,” Smiley said very calmly. “We’re going to need you to send one back, Jeremy.”

Later the theory would go that the wife had ratted them out: she was, they said, loyal, a true believer, a fanatic; she couldn’t go along with it. That was the only way they could explain how the Czech police knew exactly where they were going to be: it was only Prideaux’s quick wit, they said, that had stopped them all from being shot right there. He was quick with a steering wheel, they said, and had a sixth sense like no other field agent the Circus had ever seen; he had veered into the woods. Accounts varied after this detail in the narrative: some claimed they drove for miles in the underbrush, others that they all got out of the car straightaway and scattered.

For a time all that was known was that the defection had not gone off: Prideaux’s whereabouts were unknown, and the Czech couple’s remained a mystery. Nobody, at this time, knew about the operation at all except the men on the ground in Czecho and Germany, and Smiley and Control and the burrower Connie Sachs, who had been sworn up and down to secrecy, and had buried herself in research the past two weeks, though to what use, it now seemed unclear—and of course Haydon, who had turned unbearably snappish and barely came out of his office unless forced. Even Control was acting shorter with people than normal, although Smiley remained as unflappable as ever. So everybody knew that something was going on, though they hadn’t the faintest clue what. It was around Christmas. The girls had put up some tinsel and boughs of pine that were beginning to look a bit weary, and were scattering needles everywhere, but nobody was feeling particularly festive.

This changed the morning that Jim Prideaux came into Cambridge Circus with Control, looking considerably older than he had the last time he had walked through the front doors, not saying much and looking fairly inscrutable. He had shown up at the door of Control’s flat several nights before, wet and haggard and in need of a shave, and Control had told his wife that he was his nephew who was addicted to one of those new drugs—you know, the really bad ones—oh, was it heroin? Well, whatever the case, such a sad story. Nothing to be done, a real pity. A real waste of potential. Such a good boy, was Jim. Fortunately, Jim was polite even when near-unconscious, and Control’s wife was a maternal woman who had been denied children by her husband’s choice of profession, and so was very happy to make him up a bed on the couch and take his clothes to rinse out and then dry on the radiators.

“Sorry for showing up like this,” Prideaux said later, when she’d gone to bed. He had a cup of tea between his large hands. “I know I shouldn’t. I didn’t know if I was blown, if I needed to go somewhere—whether I could show my face anywhere.”

“You aren’t blown,” Control said, folding his hands in front of him. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“They knew,” he said with a shrug. “They knew where we were going and beat us to it.”

“How did that happen?”

“No idea,” Prideaux said. “It’s not much of a surprise. They knew about him; he wasn’t imagining things. I’m sure they were following everything he did. Apparently he and his wife got into some big row about it when he told her. God knows what the neighbours heard.”

“What about her?” Control asked. “You said she was loyal. Haydon has been wondering.”

Prideaux didn’t say anything for a moment, just tapped the side of his cup. “No, I don’t think so,” he said finally. “She was going to have a baby.”

“Really,” Control said. “You didn’t mention _that_ in your reports.”

“It was recent news,” Prideaux said.

“I’m sure.”

“He didn’t tell her until the last minute because he knew she would argue,” he said, leaning back against the back of the couch with a sigh, “but that if he gave her a black and white choice she’d come with him. And she did.”

“So what happened to them?”

“They died,” Prideaux said. “Do you have a cigarette? They got shot.”

Control fished a carton out of his pocket and handed it over to him along with a lighter. Prideaux took it and pulled one out and rolled it between his fingers for a moment before lighting it.

“They got her as she was running,” he said after he’d taken a drag, and scratched at his beard. “Then they dragged him back to the road and tried to ask him questions, but he wasn’t having any of it. Just kept screaming about his wife.”

“Why did they shoot him, instead of taking him back to be questioned?”

“He tried to take one of their guns,” Prideaux said, exhaling toward the ceiling. “I’m sure they were reprimanded. But they didn’t seem very interested in trying to keep him alive.”

“And why didn’t they come after you?” Control asked, taking the carton back lighting a cigarette himself.

“I was deep in the woods by then,” Prideaux said, still staring at the ceiling. “I could only just hear what was going on. A couple of them walked in just a short ways and looked around but then they went back to the road. I don’t know why.”

“I wonder,” Control mused. “I wonder.”

“I’m sorry for coming here,” Prideaux said again, looking at him. “I know I shouldn’t.”

“It’s quite appropriate,” Control said. “You weren’t blown. At least not that I know. I don’t think we should send you back to Czecho for a while.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“Everyone will be very pleased to see you,” Control said, as Prideaux scratched at his beard again. “Mr Haydon has been in a particularly foul mood the past month.”

He closed his eyes, and Control watched him. It would have shocked many of the others to know that he had come to this particular flat. Only Smiley, of the others, knew where it was located. Prideaux had sometimes done thing for Control: small things, or things that had seemed small, that nobody else knew about. Except for Smiley he had always been his favourite. It was Jim Prideaux’s particular curse to believe that nobody preferred him when, in fact, everybody did.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“I know it has,” Control said. “Everything has changed. But it is also all the same, as you will soon see.”

“I don’t think in English anymore,” Jim said. “Not even dreams.”

“You will again,” Control told him. “Soon it will be as though you were never anywhere other than England. As though all foreign places were just a dream.” This, Jim thought, was the same in the West and the East, and probably everywhere: the belief that where you lived was the only real place, and everywhere else an illusion. For believing the whole world was real would be enough, he thought, to drive a man mad.

 

*

 

There is something missing in the story. An important detail. To get there we will have to go backward, a whole month to the dreary November days when Control and Smiley and Connie Sachs and Haydon were planning the extradition of the Czech couple and their secret child who would never be born, just before it came off—in fact to the very night before. Fred Stanley was in the office late finishing a report and so Susanne was there late too, reading a book: _The Manchurian Candidate_. Dora’s copy was going round the office as a kind of object of comedy.

Finally, Mr Stanley emerged, squashing his hat onto his head, coat hanging crookedly off his shoulders. “Done,” he said, sounding relieved. “You needn’t have stayed all this time.”

“Oh, it was no trouble at all, Mr Stanley,” said Susanne, who knew that if she had left while he was still toiling away he would have stopped to instead worry about where she had gone and what he was supposed to do if he needed anything. He had become quite dependent on her in spite of himself. “Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He muttered something in reply before weaving out of the office, and she went in to clean up his desk and straighten up his papers: they were scattered everywhere and rather evoked a bombsite, and were accompanied by multiple teacups and a dirty plate. She sighed, and got to work.

By the time she finally left it was past nine and the lights in the office had been dimmed. She ran her hand over the railing as she walked down the stairs, yawning, and paused on the second floor when she saw a light coming from a room down one of the corridors.

She stopped and looked in either direction before peering at her watch again. It was too late for anyone to be there—it was too late for _her_ to be there. She thought that room was a transmission room. She chewed her lip, and turned away from the stairs to walk toward the light.

When she pushed the door open Mr Haydon, who was standing above the telegraph machine, started so violently she stepped backward, hand still on the doorknob. He put a hand over his heart and smiled at her. “You’re quiet as a mouse,” he said.

“I’m awfully sorry, Mr Haydon,” she said. “I saw the light as I was leaving and I didn’t know if anybody might be doing anything—improper.”

“That’s quite all right,” he said, looking down at the machine for a glancing moment. “Good instincts. I always thought you’d be a good field agent, if only you weren’t such a good London girl.”

“Really?” she asked. She didn’t tell him she wasn’t from London.

“Oh, yes,” he said, and a silence descended. She wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t know why he was sending a telegraph alone at night but she was sure he must have a good reason. He didn’t have anything else with him. But there was something off about the scene that she couldn’t pinpoint.

“Is everything all right, Mr Haydon?” she asked.

“Perfectly fine,” he said, and then paused. “We’re engaged in something quite delicate,” he said. “About Mr Prideaux.” Her eyebrows rose. “Yes, it’s all very unexpected. Nobody must know. We aren’t sure what may happen.”

“Oh,” she said, “oh, I hope—well, I hope everything’s all right,” and then felt silly, for of course it wasn’t.

“Yes,” Mr Haydon said with a frown, looking back down at whatever he had been typing. “As do I. It’s all quite tricky with fieldwork, you know. You can never really trust anybody. And of course when you’re bloody thousands of miles away reduced to—sending telegrams about it, it’s worse than having your bollocks cut off. Pardon my French.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I wish I could do something to help.”

He glanced up at her. “You know,” he said, “as do I. As do I. It’s a pity, isn’t it? I think you really _would_ have made an excellent agent. You’re a watcher. In the field all the best people are watchers. And you don’t care about yourself.” She felt suddenly cold. “Of course, if you’re going to run people in the field you have to not care much about them either. Or not get too broken up about it if something goes wrong. Things always go wrong. I was always a bit rubbish in the field, you know, too egotistical. That’s why I’m never leaving that desk again.” He sighed. “I’m just going on now. Can’t think straight with all of this.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll let you be.”

He looked at her again: as if he were seeing straight through her. “You’re a good girl,” he said almost distractedly. “You’ll have a good life when you get out of here someday.”

“I don’t want to get out of here,” she said.

“You will,” he said. “Don’t mention this to anyone, will you? It’s quite sensitive.”

“Of course,” she said.

“Cheers,” he said, and went back to typing. She closed the door behind her as she left, and when she walked out the front gates, she almost ran into George Smiley.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello, Mr Smiley. I’m awfully sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

He made a vague, dismissive sound, and walked with her to the tube station without saying much, umbrella swinging over his arm. Even after they were blocks away, she kept wanting to turn around and look back at the Circus over her shoulder: what, she wondered, was happening inside? Smiley looked even paler than usual.

“Good night,” she said when she left him, and he watched her go down into the earth before trudging home toward the house on Bywater Street, brooding on defectors and the subject of Jim Prideaux, and on the subject of his wife, who as likely as not would not be home that evening.

In the Circus, Bill Haydon waited until the girl was safely gone and then kept typing up his telegram, as quickly as he could. When he had finished, he collapsed back in the chair behind the desk with a sigh, listening to the machine whirr, before busying himself with undoing his tracks. And the following night, when the police who were not police found the Czech couple in the woods and dragged them out onto the road, they did not follow the Englishman who had vanished into the night.

 

*

 

When Jim Prideaux walked into the Circus with Control a month later, wearing one of his old suits, which had been recalled from storage, cheeks slightly hollow, silver just beginning to enter his temples, the first person to see and recognise him was Percy Alleline, who stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of him. He looked neither thrilled nor disappointed: he simply looked gobsmacked. His little puckered mouth sagged open and when he attempted to conjure up words, none emerged.

“Hello, Percy,” Prideaux said mildly. “You’re looking well.”

“Jim,” Alleline choked out finally.

The second person was Liz, who was running something upstairs to Control’s office for Bland, and nearly tripped over herself when she laid her eyes on him. She wordlessly passed the note off to Ursula before dashing back downstairs, where she pantingly delivered the news to the room at large, and when Bland came out of his office a few minutes later he was perplexed to see that there were no women to be seen anywhere on the floor. In fact they had all crammed themselves into the kitchen.

“Ladies,” Mrs Huntington said a few moments later, when she had found them, opening the door rather majestically. “What on earth is—”

“Jim Prideaux’s back, ma’am,” Edith said, and at this, even Mrs Huntington had to pause for a moment at this news. The girls who remembered him were buzzing with a strange energy, and those who didn’t were practically bursting with desire for new gossip.

“I see,” she said after a moment. “Well, that doesn’t excuse you from your duties for the day, I’m afraid. You may all discuss this at lunch.” She paused. “Where is Mrs MacKinney?”

But Stacy, upon hearing the news, had immediately run upstairs, looking frantic, and continued hurtling toward Control’s office until she practically skidded to a stop at the sight of Control and Prideaux talking to Ursula. Prideaux turned to look over his shoulder after a moment, as if alerted by some sixth sense, and for a moment didn’t do anything but look, expression unchanging, before murmuring something in Control’s ear. He had to bend down to do it: he was much taller.

“Hello, Stacy,” he said a moment later, having taken a few steps closer. His hands were in his pockets. “I hear you and Bill have become quite fast friends in my absence.”

She covered her face with one hand as she started to cry, face scrunching up unattractively, still staring out at him as though he were a ghost. He swallowed before reaching out his hand. She grabbed it with the one that wasn’t occupied. Everybody else on the floor was tactfully looking away except for Control, who saw everything.

“Come now,” he said, opening the door to his office. “In here.”

Prideaux led her inside and Control closed the door behind them. “Hello, Stacy,” he said again. “How have you been?”

“Stop it,” she said. “You awful man. You look so old.”

He glanced down at himself. “I’m sure that’s not what you’re meant to say to me right now,” he said. “Although I agree. You’re looking very well. Are you and Adam very happy?”

“Nobody’s very happy,” she choked out.

“Sure they are,” he said. “Somewhere.”

“Stop it,” she said. “Stop it.”

“Are you happy enough?” he asked, running his long hands against each other. She couldn’t stop looking at his sunken-in cheeks.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m very lucky. I know I’m very lucky. I’m not like Bill.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and finally settled on, “I thought Bill had a lovely bride too.”

She sniffed and wiped at her nose. “I don’t have a bride,” she said. “And don’t be stupid. You know what he’s done.”

“I have no idea what Bill’s done,” he said, very honestly. “I never have any idea what Bill is doing.”

“Well,” she said, “you ought to go talk to him about it.”

He hesitated. “Yes,” he said, running his fingers down his tie. “I suppose.”

When he walked onto the floor he had once occupied, years before, he was greeted by the sight of dozens of staring eyes. He ignored them and made his way to Bill’s door, which was blessedly closed, and opened it without knocking.

Bill was turned away from the door and had his feet up on the desk, phone pressed up against his ear. “Well, I didn’t say we _couldn’t_ ,” he was saying in his most reasonable tone of voice. “There’s nothing we _couldn’t_ do, isn’t that right, except send a fucking hydrogen bomb to Moscow to—”

He swung around when Jim closed the door behind him and had half of an admonition out before he saw him. Then all the blood drained from his face and he didn’t move for a long minute. Jim could hear whoever was on the other end of the line making noise, trying to figure out whether something had gone wrong with the call. Finally, Bill swallowed, licked his lips, and said, “I’ll give you a ring later, all right? Cheers,” and hung up the phone.

“’Lo, Bill,” Jim said, and smiled. Bill stared at him for a moment before pulling his hands down his cheeks.

“What,” he started, and then stopped.

“I’ve been holed up at Control’s the past few days,” Jim said, almost apologetically. “His wife thinks I’m his nephew and that I’ve got some kind of problem with heroin.”

“I—fuck,” Bill said, leaning down on his knees rather violently, burying his face in his hands. “Fuck.”

“I had quite a beard, you should have seen it,” Jim said mildly, running a hand along his jaw. “It was probably your only chance.”

“How could I have, I don’t know where fucking—” Bill started from behind his hands, and then stopped.

“Had a couple warm meals,” Jim said quietly. “First in a while. I didn’t know if I was blown. Couldn’t go any of the usual places.”

“You—”

“Getting out of Germany was a trick and a half,” he said. “I can tell you that much.”

“Fuck,” Bill said. “Why didn’t you—”

“You’re a married man, Bill,” Jim said quietly.

“Oh fuck off, Jim,” Bill snapped, dropping his hands. “Don’t—”

“Bill,” Jim said. “I’m very tired.”

Haydon went quiet and looked up at him. He did look tired: his skin looked like paper. He had less hair than he had had when he had left, and all the flesh left on him was corded muscle.

“We all thought you were dead,” he told him. “Shot up in some—Bohemian forest.”

“I’m tricky to kill,” Jim said with a shadow of a smile. “Resistant. It doesn’t agree with me.” He was shifting from one foot to another, hands pressed against the door behind him, avoiding looking straight into Haydon’s eyes.

“Jim,” Bill said. “I don’t—would you just stay here for a while. Just—sit there, on the sofa. Would you? Not even to—just to sit.”

Jim didn’t move for a long moment and then pushed himself forward, away from the door, moving like a much older man, and went to sit down on the sofa. It was too low for his long legs and they splayed out in front of him as he sagged backward, tilting his head back to look at the familiar ceiling. As soon as he’d begun to move Haydon had collapsed back into his chair.

“Did you miss it?” Bill asked after he had spent a long minute watching him.

“Hmm?” Jim asked, turning to look at him again.

“England,” Bill asked.

“Oh,” Jim said. “Sometimes. Not so much. You forget after a while.”

“Really,” Bill said, sounding sceptical.

“It’s not like you’ve never been in the field,” Jim said. “You haven’t spent your whole life behind this desk.”

“It wasn’t the same in the War,” Bill said.

“You wouldn’t know,” Jim said, and Bill shut up for a few minutes. Finally, Jim sighed, and settled his head back to look up at the ceiling again.

“I didn’t really grow up here,” he said finally, by way of explanation. “Except when I was very small. I grew up in international schools and came back to Durham at holidays to see my mother’s family. I don’t think I’m really properly English. So it isn’t the same for me to leave. My father always liked Prague.”

“You’re the most English person I know,” Bill told him briskly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Jim glanced over at him without moving his head. “More English than _you_?”

“Of course,” Bill said, light. “How many of us are there? Us _aristocrats_. What percent? We’re not real people.”

“If I’m your metric for reality, Bill—”

“Oh, come off it, Jim, you know what I _mean_ —”

“Of course I missed you,” Jim said finally, sounding worn out but looking looser than he had when he’d walked in the door. “That’s what you want me to tell you, isn’t it? That I missed you. ‘England’s’ a rubbish code word, Bill.”

Bill sat frozen for a moment before sliding down a little in his chair and sticking his leg out so that their ankles touched. “You know I’m a shite codebreaker, Jim,” he said.

“You’re no such thing,” Jim told him. “That’s a lie you spread to get out of doing the work.” The tension had gone out of his face and he looked younger again but still older than he had when he had left, years before.

“Don’t tell,” Bill said, and Jim grinned. He wasn’t sure why, but there were tears in the corners of his eyes. Bill was looking at him with a strange expression: he looked sad, sad in his bones, which Bill never did. At least not that Jim could remember.

“I won’t breathe a word,” Jim said, and didn’t move for the rest of the day, until he’d fallen asleep sitting there, and Bill gave up any pretence of doing work, and instead just watched him.

 

*

 

Later, when he had cause, Jim Prideaux would remember the night before they had left for Europe so many years before. They were young and eager for whatever was coming, and it was only later that Jim would know to never look forward to any of it: that it was all a kind of divine punishment, a burden that could not be escaped. They were young beautiful boys and still did not know what corpses smelled like.

There was a blackout in London, which would not be hit for another month, but Bill wanted to go out walking. “We’re not going to get hit,” he said. “The night before we go? What are the chances?”

“That’s not how probability works,” Jim pointed out.

“Fine, then we’re testing fate,” Bill said, waggling his eyebrows. “Come on, when will London look like this again? Maybe by the time we come back London won’t be here at all. Maybe we’ll come back in body bags. Maybe we’ll get blown to pieces.”

“Stop it,” Jim said, “it isn’t a joke,” but out they went.

It was dark in London: you could see the stars, and the moon, and just the glimmers of light from around the edges of people’s blackout curtains. Cars were driving slowly down the roads with their headlights put out, and girls were riding their bikes with their skirts flying out behind them like silent ghosts. Bill was delighted.

“It’s like it’s more and less alive at the same time,” he said. “Do you know what I mean?” Jim didn’t.

They snuck into Regent’s Park against Jim’s protestations—“You’re going to make a _dreadful_ spy”—and Bill settled down near a copse of trees, lying down to stare up at the sky. Jim lay down next to him, resigned.

“If a bomb comes we’ll take shelter,” Bill said vaguely, gesturing at the trees.

“If a bomb comes the trees will shatter and kill us,” Jim argued.

“Hush,” Bill said, stretching out leisurely. It was warm. “Look, there’s Cassiopeia.”

“What?” Jim said.

“The constellation. The W.”

“I know it’s a constellation,” Jim said. “I have no idea what you’re pointing at.”

“ _There_ ,” Bill said, jabbing toward black space. “Oh, never mind.”

They subsided into silence for a moment.

“Do you think you’ll be able to do it?” Bill asked finally. “Keep up lying to everybody you meet,” he clarified quickly.

Jim thought about this for some time. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I suppose. You know, it’s funny, I don’t really like lying.” Bill looked over at him. “But I do all the time, don’t I? I mean, every day. So I suppose I’ve gotten good at it. And I know what’s true. So as long as I don’t forget—” He sort of half shrugged.

“Yes,” Bill said. “As long as you don’t forget.”

“Maybe it would be different if I had a bunch of people I’d have to be lying to _myself_ ,” Jim said. “I mean—people from my life. But it’s just my dad, isn’t it? And he barely talks to me. And people from school, but they’re all going off to do other things, so—and you.”

“And me,” Bill agreed.

“I’m sure it’s worse for you,” Jim said quite simply. “With your parents and all of that.”

“I—yes,” Bill said. “I suppose. Certain things.”

Jim looked up at the sky, scratching one of his arms, while Bill turned to look at him. If he had turned to look back he would have seen that he was quite miserable, but he did not. Instead neither of them said anything for several minutes.

“Well,” Bill said finally. “At least we’re on the good side.”

Jim yawned hugely. “Yes,” he said, and Bill rolled over to tuck his head against his neck.

“You must promise,” he mumbled, “not to die.”

“Sure, Bill,” Jim murmured. “Nobody kills me but you.”

“Christ, but you’re morbid,” Bill told him, and they fell asleep there, until it was dawn, and Bill had to drag Jim up to get him back in time for them to leave, arm hanging around his neck, a warm anchor, the last sweet shadow of childhood, soon to be obliterated.

Later Jim would think about this, and wonder at the fact that Bill had been the one to kill him in the end. They were older by then: older and sadder and harsher. Jim had run away from Bill a second time, this time out to the scalphunters’ outfit outside of London. But Bill was a person you could never entirely escape, especially if you were Jim Prideaux. Prideaux thought that, possibly, what he had said had been true: nobody else could have done it—that is, killed him. He was a man you could drop in Moscow and expect to see back in London alive; and indeed, he had even survived his own death, in a manner of speaking. But Bill had done it: he had killed Jim Prideaux, who was unkillable. But then Prideaux had also killed Bill. So ultimately, they came out even.

 

*

           

After Jim Prideaux took it upon himself to murder Bill Haydon for being a rat for Moscow Centre, and George Smiley, puzzling over how to handle the release of information—it would, he knew, get out somehow—and ultimately delegated the task to the Australian agent Craw, who published a version of events to Smiley’s liking in his local paper, it was of course only a matter of time before the information became a subject of international interest, and so only a matter of time before Stacy MacKinney and Susanne Pender and Evelyn Huntington picked up their morning papers to see a photo of Bill Haydon gracing the front page with a headline something like: _MOLE DISCOVERED AT HIGHEST LEVELS OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE_. And this was also, of course, how they discovered that he was dead.

Susanne, who was at that time at home with three children, picked up the phone and looked up the number she had for Stacy MacKinney in her phone book, which was out-dated, but when she called it, she wound up being redirected to her new number at the Home Office.

“Hi, Stacy,” she said after Stacy picked up, watching Louisa, who was three, run around the sofa making noises like an airplane, again and again. “This is Susanne—”

“So you’ve seen about Bill, then,” Stacy said, sounding slightly flat.

“Did you know?” Susanne asked.

“No,” Stacy said. “No idea. They don’t pass that kind of information to us over here, and I wouldn’t hear anything anyway, unless it went through Edwards.”

“No, I suppose not,” Susanne said, winding the phone cord around her fist. “I just—”

“Couldn’t believe it,” Stacy said. “No, me neither. You know that Jim’s dead, don’t you?”

“What?” Susanne said, startled.

“Jim Ellis,” Stacy said. “One of his work names. All over the papers last year? Shot up in Czecho? I suppose Bill gave him up. He must have been on a job, if he was using the English name.”

Susanne felt quite ill all of the sudden. She supposed she had only been in shock before.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You have children now, don’t you?” Stacy said a moment later, after Susanne hadn’t said anything else. She sounded kinder.

“Yes,” Susanne said. “Three.”

“That’s nice,” Stacy said. “What’re they called?”

“Sophie, Elliot, and Louisa,” Susanne said. “Eight, six, and three.”

“That’s very nice,” Stacy said. “And he’s a nice fellow?”

“Oh, yes, very,” Susanne said. “Barrister.”

“I remember,” Stacy said.

“Are you and Adam still…?” Susanne started, trailing off into a question.

“Oh, of course,” Stacy said, sounding faintly surprised. “Where else would we be.”

“I don’t know,” Susanne said. “It’s just something to ask.”

“I know,” Stacy said. “Everybody assumes.”

“I didn’t—” Susanne started.

“It’s quite all right,” Stacy said, and then paused. “You know, I wouldn’t have had them even if I could.”

There seemed to be nothing to say to this, so Susanne didn’t, and after a moment, Stacy sighed.

“When I started, Evelyn told me: ‘Don’t trust anybody. Not even me. Nobody in this building is telling you the truth.’ Did she tell that to you? And I thought I could keep it up. I think she knew none of us could. It was all impossible. You have to trust people. Believe in them. Otherwise life is a waste of time. But in that place—she was right. They were all bastards.”

 _Except Jim_ , Susanne filled in silently, and knew that Stacy was thinking the same thing. Something occurred to her suddenly.

“Do you know where George Smiley lives?” she asked. “Or could you find out?”

“Yes, I think so,” Stacy said after a moment’s pause. Susanne could practically hear her frowning. “Why?”

“I want to talk to him,” Susanne said.

“Better you than me,” Stacy said. “Can I put you on hold? I think I could find it quickly. I’m sure he’s unlisted.”

“Sure,” Susanne said, and then had to lurch to her feet when Louisa, in a predictable move, banged herself against the arm of the couch and collapsed backwards onto the floor, letting out a high-pitched wail.

“Susanne?” Stacy said a few minutes later, when Susanne was still bouncing the girl—who was really too big for it now—up and down on her hip. She was incredibly heavy. “I’ve got it, have you got a pen?”

“Yes, one second—” Susanne said, and managed to get down an address on Bywater Street through Louisa’s renewed shrieking. “I’ve got to go, she’s acting up.”

“Sure,” Stacy said, sounding amused. “Bye, Susanne.”

“Bye,” Susanne said, and then found herself staring at the phone she had just hung up, cord mangled next to it, as she held her little girl to her chest.

She did not go that Saturday, because when she told Colin she was meeting an old friend from her work days, he said, “Fantastic, could you take the children? I’ve loads of work to do this weekend,” and the Saturday after that her parents were down from the new house in Kenilworth, and the Saturday after that she had to meet up with some of the other mothers on the street with their children and talk about nothing while watching them play. And so the weeks accumulated, and the little slip of paper with the address remained stuck in her address book, until finally she told Colin that she _was_ going to go visit her old friend, and that she could _not_ watch the children that Saturday afternoon, and he looked up from his work with an expression of such bewilderment that she immediately felt ashamed. “Well, I can’t possibly look after all three of them and get anything done,” and so she wound up taking the Tube from Bromley all the way up into Chelsea with Louisa sitting next to her, kicking her legs against the seat below her and turning and craning to look out the window. The other two had stayed at home with Colin to do what they would, although Sophie had made a great stink about not being taken into London to look at the shops. “You’re in London, dear,” Colin had said without looking up from the paper, “and Mummy isn’t going to the shops.” “But it’s not the _same_ ,” she’d protested, and it was hard to argue.

Of course, Susanne thought as the train rattled and Louisa tried to stick her entire fist into her mouth, there was no knowing whether Smiley would even be at home: there was no knowing whether he would even be in the Bywater Street house at all anymore, what with Ann. Susanne had seen her at a couple of Christmas parties: Ann Smiley had not been kept in the dark about her husband’s business, though that apparently had not helped his cause. Of course, the story about Ann had always really been nothing but scraps and conjectures, like everything else in the Circus: nobody ever really knew anything about Smiley. They only thought they did.

She hesitated before knocking on the door, but Louisa was giving her a leery eye, and when the door opened it was indeed Smiley standing there peering out at her. He blinked when he saw her, and looked down at Louisa, who was twisting back and forth next to her, hanging onto her hand, and said, “Miss Dyer. What a surprise.”

“I hope we aren’t intruding,” Susanne said.

“No, of course not,” he said, opening the door all the way and stepping aside to let them pass. “Come in.”

He took their coats once he had closed the door, acting oddly formal with Louisa, who was watching him without saying anything. She was not a very talkative child, though she could on occasion be a very noisy one.

“Shall I make some tea?” Smiley asked.

“Oh, that would be very nice,” Susanne said, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, until he gestured at the sofa.

“I’m afraid I don’t have much for the little one,” he said.

“That’s all right, I fed her before we came,” Susanne told him, and pulled her over to sit with her in the slightly musty parlour.

Smiley seemed much older now than he had when she had left the Circus: it should not have been surprising but it was. He seemed like an old man. The house, too, seemed old; a kind of relic pressed in-between the pages of a book. Old Circus: that was what they had called Smiley and Haydon and all the rest. They’d all called themselves “Old Circus” after Prideaux had left and younger girls had come in and not remembered him but that hadn’t been true. They had not been old anything.

Smiley came back in with some little chocolate biscuits that Louisa attacked with fervour.

“Very good,” he said, sitting down carefully across from them.

“What do you say,” Susanne whispered, and Louisa emitted a garbled thank-you.

“I suppose,” he said a moment later, “that this is about Mr Haydon.”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw the news. I meant to come earlier, but—well, everything is awfully busy.”

“Of course,” he said, and paused. “Well, it was bound to get out sooner or later, so there was really nothing to be done.”

“When did it happen?” she asked.

“Oh, some time ago now,” he said, and let out the tiniest of sighs. “It’s been a very eventful period.”

“I see,” she said, and paused. “And Mr Prideaux? He died—”

Smiley’s face did not move at all. “Last year.” After a long moment he shifted a little in his seat and added, “Control sent him out to Czecho to get intelligence on the mole in the Circus. You can imagine that Moscow couldn’t well allow that to go through.”

She looked at Louisa eating for a moment. She had blonde hair that curled at the end, the kind that would wind up brown when she was grown-up, and she was eating the crumbs on the plate one-by-one.

“I just—” she began, and stopped. She had not, she realised, planned exactly what she wanted to say. She had never had much to do with Smiley, in the Circus, not directly. But he was and had always been, as long as she could recall, their single most reliable authority. Even more than Control, who was prone to flights of fury, and in any case rarely left his office—they all trusted George. They all could trust George. She saw him suddenly, in the misting rain outside the Tube the night she had seen Haydon sending his telegraph, and hugged her arms closer to her chest.

“Can’t believe it,” he filled in calmly.

“No,” she said. “It seems too impossible.”

“Which part?” he asked. “Bill Haydon working for Moscow Centre, or Jim Prideaux being dead?”

“I don’t know,” she said all of it. “I suppose Mr Prideaux being dead, if—if—”

“If Mr Haydon was the one who did it,” Smiley finished, speaking gently. “Well, I do think he did his best to undo his dirty work, although by then it was too late.”

“The job in Czecho,” she said after a long pause, “in sixty—the couple who wanted to defect. When he came back after those couple of years away. They should have got him then, and they didn’t. So Mr Haydon must have—”

Smiley got that reflective look, like he was reading something inside of his own mind.

“Yes,” he said. “I only realised that after the rest of it. It was quite some time ago. Longer for me than for you. Control always simply said he had managed to escape. The Czech system was not well organised then. And Jim always was very good at getting away.” He paused. “We always thought it was the wife who did it. She was very loyal.”

“You should have asked me,” Susanne said, suddenly feeling desperate for no reason at all, “you should have asked me, I saw something. He was sending telegrams late one of those nights before all of that happened—maybe a little more than a month before Jim came back—and acting strange. I assumed he was just worried. He said you were all working on something to do with him. That it was delicate.”

Smiley was looking at her very sharply now, from behind his large spectacles. “Really,” he said.

“Did you even talk to Stacy?” she asked. “She knew everything about both of them.” Smiley said nothing. Susanne felt like something was choking her, some unutterably large thing, smothering her breath.

“You should have asked us,” she said. Louisa looked up, with her child’s intuition. Susanne set her hand on her hair.

“I should have,” Smiley said. “But it would not have helped Jim.”

She deflated. “No,” she said dully. “I suppose not.”

“Control was getting old and paranoid,” Smiley said. “Even about me. But he wasn’t wrong. He was convinced there was someone in the Circus who was working for Moscow. And it was Bill.”

“Do you know how long?” she asked.

“Well,” Smiley said. “Forever.”

She looked down at Louisa, who had moved onto staring with immense curiosity up at Smiley, who was now gazing thoughtfully back down at her. She suddenly turned up to Susanne and pulled at her sleeve until she leaned down and whispered something.

“Oh,” Susanne said, and then turned to Smiley, who was looking at her expectantly.

“She’s asked me who Miss Dyer is,” she said. “I’m Mrs Pender now.”

“Of course,” Smiley said. “Very sharp.”

“I used to be Miss Dyer,” she said down to Louisa. “Then I married Papa and now I’m Mrs Pender.”

Louisa took this in.

“She has quick eyes,” Smiley said. “How old?”

“Just gone three,” Susanne told him.

“I remember,” he said, “Bill once said to me that he thought you would be an good field agent. I can’t remember when that was. Of course he would have known, wouldn’t he?”

“He told me that once, too,” she said. “I thought it was a line he used on girls. It was so absurd. I would have been awful.”

“No,” Smiley said thoughtfully. “Perhaps he thought you were dangerous.”

She let out an incredulous little laugh.

“I didn’t suspect a thing,” she said. “I wasn’t dangerous at all. When I started I didn’t know anything.”

“Nobody knows anything when he starts at the Circus,” Smiley says. “Or she. Mr Haydon did not himself. Or Mr Prideaux. Or even me.” He paused. “And nobody suspected anything. Nobody wanted to.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are ways of ignoring things that you know,” he said calmly. “It is much easier to ignore something that will hurt you than to look it straight in the face.”

She rubbed her fingers along her skirt. “Why did it happen this time?” she asked finally. “I mean, with Mr Prideaux. If he was in Czecho when he died—running a mission—and Haydon gave him up—well, the last time—”

“I suspect,” Smiley said, looking down at Louisa without really looking at her, “that the first time… the first time he said something to them about the value of having him there. With his contacts set up, and his identities running. That it wouldn’t make sense to kill him. Possibly something about the value of the personal relationship, how much Haydon could get out of it, so on and so forth. By this time… Control sent him in to get information on the mole in the Circus. He was too close to getting to Haydon himself. There wasn’t any excuse anymore.”

Susanne’s skin was crawling. “That’s—that’s—”

“Diseased,” Smiley said evenly. “But tragic, don’t you agree? He could have fixed all his problems very easily. Well, not _easily_ —but the first step would have been easy. He could have gone to Control and offered to play the other side. They might have locked him away, or they might have used him.”

“Why didn’t he?” Susanne asked.

Smiley looked up at her again, through his large spectacles. “Playing for one team is just the same as playing for the other,” he said. “And then he would have had to admit to Mr Prideaux that he had been lying to him for thirty years. Which was something he could never do.”

“At least he never found out, I suppose,” Susanne said, and when Smiley blinked, she said, “Mr Prideaux. At least he never found out about Mr Haydon.”

Smiley let out a little laugh. “Yes,” he said. “At least we can be grateful for that.”

“I just wonder,” she said after a long moment’s pause. “What the point of it all was. If everything we were doing was just—going over there anyway. Before we’d done it.” She paused again. “But I suppose none of it really matters in the first place at all.”

“It’s a race,” Smiley said eventually. “That’s all. A race.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. Louisa chewed on the last biscuit and then ate the crumbs off the table. She and Smiley regarded each other.

“What will you do about it now?” Susanne asked finally.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, “I’ve retired,” which was not exactly true—he’d been dismissed, a second time; the first had been Bill's doing—but true enough. Soon there would be no Old Circus left at all.

He walked them to the door a little while later and shook Louisa’s hand quite formally, and sent her on her way with a couple more chocolate biscuits and instructions to keep everything she’d seen a secret. She had nodded formally. Susanne looked over her shoulder at him as she walked down the street, and he watched them through the window until they were out of sight before turning back to his house and sighing, taking his glasses off and wiping them off on the sleeve of his shirt.

He slowly walked upstairs and sat on the old bed and tried to remember Bill and Jim as they had been as kids before the War at the nursery at Sarratt, before he’d been shipped off to Germany, straight into the lion’s den. Sometimes, now, he felt he could barely remember it himself: his life had become a long stretch of grey. His real war was the one that had come after. But he could still conjure up the image of the two of them: they had been like an icon of youth, and vitality, and the purest kind of love. Of course this was all a façade. These are all the tricks of the devil.

Jim Prideaux, he thought, was dead, although Jim Ellis was living somewhere in Cornwall, teaching boys school French, as he would, Smiley imagined, for the rest of his life. When they had found Haydon’s body mutilated at Sarratt everyone had mutually agreed not to ask too many questions: his guards were cleared, as were Smiley and his associates. Jim Prideaux could not be cleared, because he was dead, and so he would continue living his miserable unremarkable existence as a regular person who had not done or seen the things he had done and seen, and who had never so much as heard the name “Bill Haydon” in his life. It was true that Haydon had managed to drag Prideaux back out of Czecho while there was still breath in his body, instead of leaving him to rot in a cell or a grave in Moscow, but the fact remained that he had killed him. There was nothing for him to do but to remain dead.

Before he had gone off to Czecho the first time, all those years ago, Control had said to Smiley, “He needs to get away from Haydon. He loves him so much he’s going blind.”

“Can you stop a man from blinding himself?” Smiley had asked, ruminatively, and Control had shrugged.

“About as well as you can stop him from drinking himself to death,” he’d said, but still, Smiley thought: they had tried as best they could, although they had failed. For even they could not make out the devil in his many disguises: for they were merely men, without the power of gods, although they had believed that they were gods, and suffered badly for their hubris.

**Author's Note:**

> I am [on tumblr](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com)!


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